Three guesses: which particular species of word repetition am I going to tackle today?

Actually, that was a trick question — I’m going to be talking about two of the most common, gratuitous character name repetition and character naming that inadvertently gives the impression of same. Why talk about them together, you ask? Because in manuscript submissions, faux pas of a feather tend to flock together.

Why, yes, that was a mixed metaphor, now that you mention it. Would that the following not-all-that-uncommon type of fiction opening suffered from only metaphor-blending.

Morris strode into the opulent drawing room, so oddly out of keeping with the rest of the austere log cabin. “Mona, I’ve had enough,” Morris said. “It’s me or Maurice!”

Mona moaned. “Darling Morris,” Mona mentioned, “whatever do you mean? Marius means nothing to me, and Mencius hasn’t entered my thoughts for years. Now Merton, on the other hand…”

“Aha!” Morris gloated audibly. “Hoist with your own petard, Mona!”

“I haven’t used a petard in years, Morris,” Mona murmured, but he seemed not to hear her.

“I wasn’t talking about that twit Marius, Mona — I am accusing you of being in love with Maurice!” Morris muscled aside a dainty occasional table. “What have you to say to that, Mona?”

Mona looked blank. “Maurice who?”

Maddening to read, is it not? If you really want to drive yourself mad, try reading it out loud. Or simply step into Millicent the agency screener’s shoes and read a good third of the fiction openings on any given day.

Why are these phenomena so pervasive in submissions? Believe it or not (but I hope you select the former), as evident as the too-similar names would be to virtually any reader, most aspiring writers — nay, most writers, period — seem to have a hard time noticing how their name choices can distract the reader. Or so I surmise from how defensive writers often get when editors like me suggest, however gently, that perhaps their manuscripts might benefit from some name fine-tuning.

In fact, I would bet a wooden nickel of the variety that folks are always urging one not to take that a fairly hefty proportion of the otherwise excellently-humored writers reading this have already taken a bit of umbrage from the nation’s seemingly inexhaustible supply. “But character names are a creative choice!” writers everywhere protest, indignant. “And if I like a character’s name, why shouldn’t I use it a lot? It’s necessary for clarity, you know!”

Is it now? More to the point, is it always? I ask because usually, what indignant name-dropping writers have in mind as the only feasible alternative is something like this:

He strode into the opulent drawing room, so oddly out of keeping with the rest of the austere log cabin. “I’ve had enough,” he said. “It’s me or him!”

She moaned. “Darling, whatever do you mean? He means nothing to me, and that other guy hasn’t entered my thoughts for years. Now a third fellow, on the other hand…”

“Aha!” he gloated audibly. “Hoist with your own petard!”

“I haven’t used a petard in years,” she murmured, but he seemed not to hear her.

“I wasn’t talking about that twit — I am accusing you of being in love with You Know Who!” He muscled aside a dainty occasional table. “What have you to say to that?”

She looked blank. “Who?”

Yes, this pronoun-fest would be a bit difficult for your garden-variety reader to follow. As justifying examples go, however, you must admit that this one’s a bit of a straw man. I’m not saying that you should never mention your characters by name at all. No one — no one sensible, anyway — would seriously suggest that, because you’re right: naming characters can be awfully handy for identification purposes.

Nor is anyone here arguing that character names don’t fall firmly within the province of authorial discretion (but don’t be surprised if your future agent/editor/some random guy from your publisher’s marketing department harbors few thoughts on the subject). No, what we sensible editorial types have in mind was a revision more along these lines:

Morris strode into the opulent drawing room, so oddly out of keeping with the rest of the austere log cabin. “Elaine, I’ve had enough,” he said. “It’s me or Armand!”

She sat bold upright on a chaise clearly designed for supporting an inclination to recline. “You mean Armand Jean, the Duc du Plessis, otherwise known as Cardinal Richelieu? Why, he’s been dead for either decades or centuries, depending upon when this scene is set!”

Morris sank to the floor, clutching his head in his hands. “Oh, God, have I been time-traveling again?”

Just kidding — that was the edit the guy from marketing wanted. (Oh, come on — you wouldn’t keep reading?) Simply making the names less similar would produce a run of text a little more like this:

Morris strode into the opulent drawing room, so oddly out of keeping with the rest of the austere log cabin. “Elaine, I’ve had enough,” Morris said. “It’s me or Arnold!”

Elaine moaned. “Darling Morris,” Elaine mentioned, “whatever do you mean? Stefan means nothing to me, and Ned hasn’t entered my thoughts for years. Now Edmund, on the other hand…”

“Aha!” Morris gloated audibly. “Hoist with your own petard, Elaine!”

“I haven’t used a petard in years, Morris,” Elaine murmured, but he seemed not to hear her.

“I wasn’t talking about that twit Stefan, Elaine — I am accusing you of being in love with Arnold!” Morris muscled aside a dainty occasional table. “What have you to say to that, Elaine?”

Elaine looked blank. “Arnold who?”

Come on, admit it — that’s easier to follow, isn’t it? As little as writers might want to hear it, anyone who has ever screened manuscripts or judged contest submissions could tell you (quite possibly whilst clutching his aching head and/or bathing his weary eyes) that the best or only test of the strength of a character’s name is not whether the writer happens to like it.

Yes, yes, I see your hackles rising, defenders of authorial rights: the writer of this turgid little exchange may well have been deeply enamored of every name in the original draft. I can guarantee, though, that the reader will find this set of monikers considerably more individually memorable — and thus more conducive to matching with each character’s personality.

While you’re retracting those hackles, however, let me ask you: this time through, did you notice how often Morris and Elaine’s names appeared for no good reason?

If you’re like most writers, the answer is no. Seriously, folks, you’d be astonished at just how often a given character’s name will pop up within a single page of text in the average manuscript submission — and even more astonished at how difficult it is for chronic name-repeaters to spot the problem in their own writing. Like the bugbear of our last few posts, the ubiquitous and, major characters’ names seem to become practically invisible to self-editing writers.

But you know better, right? In a two-person scene, is it remotely necessary to keep reminding the reader who those two people are? Yes, it’s helpful to identify speakers the first time around, but couldn’t any reader familiar with the principle of alternating dialogue be relied upon to keep track of which is speaking when thereafter?

And while we’re at it, isn’t audibly a trifle redundant here? What else are the quotation marks for, if not to alert the reader to words having been uttered aloud? Could not the writer assume sufficient intelligence in the reader to render this rendition a viable option?

Morris strode into the opulent drawing room, so oddly out of keeping with the rest of the austere log cabin. “I’ve had enough. It’s me or Arnold!”

Elaine moaned. “Darling, whatever do you mean? Stefan means nothing to me, and Ned hasn’t entered my thoughts for years. Now Edmund, on the other hand…”

“Aha! Hoist with your own petard!”

“I haven’t used a petard in years,” she murmured, but he seemed not to hear her.

“I wasn’t talking about that twit Stefan — I am accusing you of being in love with Arnold!” He muscled aside a dainty occasional table. “What have you to say to that?”

She looked blank. “Arnold who?”

Oh, there go those writerly hackles again — it takes so little to raise them. Clarity and flow not enough for you?

Of course you do — as a writer. As a reader, you almost certainly wouldn’t; let’s face it, the similarity of the names of Mona’s presumptive lovers could only be amusing for so long. It’s also a type of joke that our Millicent sees often enough in submissions that even if it did tickle her funny bone at first, it could hardly strike her as original. On the whole, she’s more likely to be pleased to see some naming restraint. She spends so much time trying to remember which character is which, you see.

Oh, you think that’s not difficult? Okay, try a little experiment: hie yourself to the nearest well-stocked bookstore and pull twenty books off the shelves. Stack them neatly before you and read the first page of each. Wait five minutes, then jot down as many of the main characters’ names as you can.

It’s not so easy. Especially if you happened to select books in which the characters boast similar names. Which prompts me to ask: everyone did catch the plethora of Js in today’s title, right?

I sincerely hope so: names beginning with J have for years been by far the most common in submission, especially in YA. Isn’t that right, Jeremy, Josh, and Jesse? And don’t even get me started on the many, many years during which John, Jon, Jonathan, Jack, and Johnny traipsed merrily through the pages of virtually any novel one might happen to pick up in an airport.

Just between us, Justin, a screener or contest judge doesn’t have to be on the job for very long to start longing for the odd Anthony, a wayward Terence, a charming Gregory, merely for the sake of variety. “Would it kill the average submitter,” Millicent moans into her third latté of the morning (hey, something’s got to keep her awake), “to give a passing thought to naming his protagonist Keith?”

Oh, Millie, I feel your pain — but at the risk of repeating myself (oh, John, must we go over this again?), it’s my considered opinion that on the manuscript page, writers just don’t spot the problem. Partially, that’s attributable to an unfortunate fact of submission: a good 90% of writers currently sending off manuscript pages to agencies, small publishers, and writing contests have never actually clapped eyes upon another writer’s manuscript.

So is it really any wonder that any given submitter should be unaware that by the time Millicent meets his protagonist, Joshua Jefferson, in the course of her screening day, she will have already had the pleasure of making the literary acquaintance of 13 other Joshes, Jeffs, and possibly their sons? As far as they know, her Josh is the only one in town.

Then, too, all of us are just used to knowing quite a few people with the same first name. So is Millicent. In her case, though, all the sympathy this experience sparks is to wonder why so few writers seem to have noticed that in the real world, it’s often kind of inconvenient when several people moving within the same circles share the same name.

Says the former coed who could walk into her collegiate dining hall, shout “David!” and see a third of her male classmates turn around. Someone in the admissions office — and in the nation’s maternity wards a couple of decades earlier — sure must have been awfully fond of it.

Before any of you slice-of-life aficionados leap to your feet to argue the virtues of having a manuscript’s naming strategy hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, let me hasten to add that it’s really, really common for readers to confuse characters whose names begin with the same capital letter, let alone the same first syllable. It may be fun to plan a story about adventurous twins Ken and Kendra, but on the page, it’s likely to confuse a skimmer. So are those intrepid best friends, Dustin and Justine.

Oh, you don’t believe me, friends of Morris, Maurice, and Marius? Okay, let’s take a peek at some of these naming faux pas in their native environment, the manuscript page. If you’re having trouble reading such small type so fast, I recommend holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image.

For those of you who would like to replicate Millicent’s experience within the comfort of home, I invite you to try to read your way all the way down the page in less than 30 seconds. On your marks, get set — squint!

How did you do? Award yourself a gold star if you spotted all 9 iterations of John in the body of the text — and another if you caught the author’s name in the header. (No, that wouldn’t count as repetition in the text, now that you mention it, but to a repetition-weary Millicent at the end of a long day, it might contribute subconsciously to her sense of being bombarded by Johns. She’s only human, you know.)

So far, so good. But let me ask you: did the 6 Paulines bug you at all? Or did they simply fade into the woodwork, because your brain automatically accepted them as necessary to the text?

Again, for most writers, the answer would be no — as long as this page had fluttered gracefully out of their own manuscripts. Admittedly, though, not all of them would have instantly leapt to their feet, crying, “My heavens, Mr. or Ms. Johns, have you never met a pronoun you’ve liked?”

That’s quite a bit more charitable than what a nit-picky reader would have shouted — and since that demographic includes practically everyone who has ever read for a living, including agents, editors, and contest judges, you might want to worry about that. Millicent, I assure you, would have found the level of name-repetition here eye-distracting.

How eye-distracting, you ask with fear and trembling? Well, let me put it kindly: how distracted from your fine writing would you find it acceptable for her to be? Wouldn’t you rather she focused upon the many excellencies of your style than all of those Js and Ps?

News flash: proper nouns are as susceptible to over-use in writing as any other kind of words. Although aspiring writers’ eyes often glide over character and place names during revision, thinking of them as special cases, to professional eyes, there is no such thing as a word exempt from being counted as repetitive if it pops up too often on the page.

In fact, proper noun repetition is actually more likely to annoy your friendly neighborhood Millicent than repetition of other nouns. (Did you catch how frequently fog appeared in that last example, by the way?) Too-frequent repetition of the character and place names makes the average editor rend her garments and the garden-variety agent moan.

If it’s any consolation, they’ve been rending and moaning for years; proper nouns have been asserting and re-asserting themselves on the manuscript page for a couple of decades now. Pros used to attribute this problem to itsy-bitsy computer screens.

Oh, did that reference perplex you, children? Ask your parents about the early Macs’ postcard-sized screens. They weren’t even tall enough to give a life-sized reflection of an adult face. If the user made the text large enough to read, the screen would only hold a dozen or so lines.

But as technology has progressed, the screens on even inexpensive computers have gotten rather large, haven’t they? Even on a tablet, you can usually view of half a page, at least. My extra-spiffy editor’s monitor can display two full-sized manuscript pages side by side. I could serve a Thanksgiving dinner for eight upon it, if I so chose.

I never have so chosen, in case you were curious. But it’s nice to have the option.

Given how much easier it is to see words on a screen now than in days of yore, Millicent is left at a loss to explain why writers so seldom have a clear idea of how distracting name repetition can be on a page. Could it possibly be as simple as writers tending to christen their major characters with their favorite names (I’m looking at you, John), ones they like so much that they simply cannot see the darn things crop up often enough?

Good guess, Millie, but I don’t think that’s all that’s going on. I suspect it has to do with how differently the eye reads text on a backlit screen: it definitely encourages skimming, if not great big leaps down the page. But for the most part, I believe it has to do with how infrequently writers read their own work in hard copy.

Hear that Gregorian-like chanting floating through the ether? That’s every writer for whom I’ve ever edited so much as a paragraph automatically murmuring, “Before submission, I must read my manuscript IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD.” I repeat this advice so often that writers who read this blog religiously have been heard to mutter this inspiring little axiom unconsciously their sleep, under their breath during important meetings, on their deathbeds…

So my prescription for learning to head this Millicent-irritant off at the pass will not, I suspect, come as a complete surprise: the best way to catch any visual pattern on the printed page is, you guessed it, to print out the page in question and read it. As I think you will soon discover, proper nouns are unusually gifted at flagging down a reader’s attention.

Since I don’t see too many of you stampeding in the direction of your manuscripts to verify this in your own writing, here’s another example. Again, you’ll get the most out of this exercise if you read it at top speed.

Did you notice how your eye longed to leap from one T to the next, even if it meant skipping some text? That’s only natural. Come a little closer, and I let you in on a closely-held professional readers’ secret: the skimming eye is automatically attracted to capital letters.

That’s why, in case you had been wondering, not-especially-literate people tend to Capitalize Words for Emphasis. When they’re not placing words that no one has ever said aloud inside quotation marks, that is — another widespread professional readers’ pet peeve. It’s virtually always grammatically incorrect to Use Punctuation to Attract Unwarranted Eyeballing, just as it’s seldom literarily acceptable to “surround” words like “this,” presumably to demonstrate to the “reader” that were these words being “spoken aloud,” someone might emphasize them, but that doesn’t seem to stop devotees of either practice.

To be fair, using punctuation as a substitute for writing that calls attention to itself does indeed work. Just be aware that among print-oriented people, that attention will probably not be positive.

Proper nouns, on the other hand, claim capitalization as a natural right. Completely legitimately, they jump off the page at the reader — which can be a good thing, if a manuscript is crammed to the gills with action, unnamed characters, and other literary titivations that do not involve the named characters. That way, reader’s eye will be drawn to the major players when they show up. Problem solved, right?

In most manuscripts, no. It’s pretty common for narratives to remind readers unnecessarily often of even the protagonist’s name. And since most novels and pretty much all memoirs deal with their respective protagonists on virtually every page, that can result in a whole lot of capital letters competing for Millicent’s attention.

Are you satisfied with that outcome, John? John? If you don’t start paying attention, I’ll have to page Pauline.

Millicent’s constantly confronted by scenes constructed by authors evidently terrified that some reader will forget who is speaking. Or so she must conclude by the frequency with which characters address one another by name — much more often than would be bearable in real life. And it’s not just the characters that seem to fall prey to this fear: narratives often compulsively name and rename everyone in sight. Heck, while we’re at it, why not remind the reader of how those characters are interrelated?

“But that’s not fair, Mom!” Cecile wailed.

Her mother stroked her bent head. “Now, Cece, you knew running for Congress was going to be hard.”

Call me zany, but I cling to the hope that when one character refers to another as Mom, a conscientious reader will be able to figure out that the latter is the former’s mother. Similarly, once that reader has been made aware that the latter gave birth to the former, I’m pretty confident that the conclusion that Cecile is the daughter will not be an especially surprising revelation.

Besides, we’re not dealing with legions of characters here. Unless the one of the characters happens to have multiple personalities, most readers will leap to the radical conclusion that the names of the conversants will not alter substantially within the course of a few pages of dialogue. So why keep labeling the participants in a scene where there’s little probability of confusing the reader?

A fine question — and the reason professional editors so frequently cut tag lines (he said, she said), rather than having the narrative identify every speaker every time s/he opens his or her pretty mouth. Once the narrative has established the speakers in two-person dialogue (far and away the most common variety, by the way), a reasonably intelligent reader is more than capable of remembering what both of those people are called by their kith and kin.

So if your text seems to have broken out in capital letters, look first at the dialogue, both inside the quotation marks and without. In dialogue where the use of tag lines has not been minimized, proper names can pop up so frequently that it’s like a drumbeat in the reader’s ear.

And it’s my job to get you to hear it as you read. I can keep producing these examples all day, people.

“I don’t think that’s fair of you, April,” Louisa snapped.

“Why not?” April asked.

“Oh, don’t be disingenuous with me, April. I’ve known you too long.”

April played with a nearby paperweight. Was she testing its weight for throwing? “Honestly, Lou, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Unless this is about John?”

“Of course it’s about John,” Louisa huffed. “How many husbands do you think I have?”

“Just one,” April said, smiling. “It’s been just John since the seventh grade.”

Louisa’s eyes stung for a moment. April always had known how to push her buttons. “Don’t change the subject, April. Next, you’ll be reminiscing about that time we tarred and feathered our classmate when we were in the fourth grade.”

April sighed. “Those were the days, eh, Lou?”

“I’ll say,” Louisa said, edging out of paperweight-tossing range. “She should have known better than to beat you at tetherball.”

Yes, speakers in the real world do call one another by name this much sometimes, but like so much of real-life dialogue, that level of repetition would be snore-inducing, if not downright hypnotic, on the page. Especially when name-bearing tag lines are featured in the text, even dialogue between just a couple of characters can convey the sense of a very crowded room.

Does that combination of frantic jumping and wild arm-waving mean that some of you would like to add something here? “But Anne,” some perennial reader-distrusters point out, “wasn’t that last example rather unwise? I mean, if you took your vicious red pen to that exchange, slashing all of the proper nouns but the first set required to set up the alternating dialogue rhythm, you’d end up in precisely the dilemma we saw at the top of this post, the one you dismissed as a straw man: a scene in which the characters share a pronoun. Get out of that one, smarty-pants!”

In the first place, I seldom edit with red pens: due to early school training, virtually any adult will perceive red-inked marginalia as more critical than commentary scrawled in another color. (And you might be shocked at how excited some adult writers become when they learn that if a paragraph is especially good, I have been known to slap a gold star next to it. Book-length revisions have been fueled by the hope of gold stars.) And in the second place, with a little finesse, depicting an exchange between pronoun-sharers need not be at all confusing.

We’re writers, after all: why should the only possible word choice to replace a proper noun be a pronoun? Use your creativity, as well as your scissors. And don’t be afraid to rearrange a little text.

“I don’t think that’s fair of you, April,” Louisa snapped.

“Why not?”

“Oh, don’t be disingenuous with me. I’ve known you too long.”

April played with a nearby paperweight. Was she testing its weight for throwing? “Honestly, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Unless this is about John?”

“Of course it is. How many husbands do you think I have?”

“Just one. It’s been just John since the seventh grade.”

Louisa’s eyes stung for a moment. April always had known how to push her buttons. “Don’t change the subject. Next, you’ll be reminiscing about that time we tarred and feathered our classmate when we were in the fourth grade.”

“Those were the days, eh, Lou?”

She edged out of paperweight-tossing range. “She should have known better than to beat you at tetherball.”

We weren’t exactly flung headlong into a morass of confusion there, were we?

“But Anne,” pronoun-eschewers protest, and who could blame them? “You keep giving us dialogue examples. I find myself going out of my way to eschew pronouns in narrative paragraphs as well. Is there then no hope of quelling my deep and abiding fear of being misunderstood when I’m describing a couple of similarly-gendered characters?”

Never fear — we already have a very capable quelling device in our tool kit. And look, here’s a dandy excerpt to which we can apply it, fresh from the pen of someone terrified that two shes in a scene is one lady too many.

Eve slapped her laptop shut with a bang and glanced around, annoyed, for her waitress. Naturally, Tanya was nowhere in sight. Eve ostentatiously drained her drink to its dregs, but when Tanya did not come running, Eve filched a straw from the table next to her. The guy tapping away on his laptop never even noticed. Eve made slurping sounds on the bottom of her glass with it.

Still no sign of Tanya. For good measure, Eve upended the glass, scattering swiftly melting ice cubes messily all over the starched white tablecloth, and began banging the now-empty vessel upon the now-sodden linen.

Eve looked up at Tanya with that my-daddy-is-someone-important air that always worked with bank tellers, hot dog vendors, and waitresses who lived primarily upon their tips. Haughtily, Eve tapped her fountain pen on each of the seven empty Perrier bottles before her. How dare Tanya treat her like a drunk?

At this juncture, dare I hope that you found this at least a bit annoying to read? Come on, admit it — if I had opened the post with this example, it would have struck you as better prose, right? Which is why, I can reveal at long last, I’ve been positively burying you in examples today: until you’ve had to read page after page of name-heavy prose, it can seems a trifle counter-intuitive that reusing a single word — any single word — within two consecutive lines might be irritating to a reader.

Yes, even if the word in question is not a proper noun. The capitalization of a name merely makes it stand out more, bellowing at Millicent, “Look at me! Repetition here! Wouldn’t want to miss it, would you?”

So what, the fearful ask, are we to do about it? Clearly, we can’t just replace all of the proper nouns with she; the narrative might conceivably become confusing. (If you retain any linger doubts about how confusing a narrative can be when no proper names are used at all, get a 4-year-old to tell you the plot of a movie he’s just seen.) And clearly, going after tag lines and characters naming one another wouldn’t be helpful in a scene containing neither.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t perform a little judicious proper noun removal surgery. We’ll just have to exercise a little more creativity. Here’s the same scene again, streamlined to minimize the perceived necessity of naming the players.

She slapped her laptop shut with a bang and glanced around, annoyed, for her waitress. Naturally, Tanya was nowhere in sight. Eve ostentatiously drained her drink to its dregs, but when no one came running, she filched a straw from the table next to her — the guy tapping away on his computer never even noticed — and made slurping sounds on the bottom of her glass with it.

Still no sign of life. For good measure, she upended the glass, scattering swiftly melting ice cubes messily all over the starched white tablecloth, and began banging the now-empty vessel upon the now-sodden linen.

Silently, Tanya snatched the glass in mid-flight. She inclined her head toward the wall clock: ten minutes past closing time.

Eve looked up at her with that my-daddy-is-someone-important air that always worked with bank tellers, hot dog vendors, and waitresses. God, she hated being treated like a drunk. Haughtily, she tapped her fountain pen on each of the seven empty Perrier bottles before her

Anybody especially confused? I thought not.

Before any of you proper noun-huggers out there start grumbling about the care required to tell when a pronoun is appropriate and when a proper noun, let me hasten to point out that this was not a very time-consuming revision. All it required to alert the reader to which she was which was a clear narrative line, a well-presented situation — and a willingness to name names when necessary.

That, and an awareness that repeating names even as far apart as three or four lines just doesn’t look good on a printed page; it can draw the eye away from an orderly, line-by-line reading, and therefore detrimental to the reading experience. A proper noun repeated more than once per sentence, or within a single line of text, almost always seems just a trifle odd to a reader — and more than a little annoying to Millicent.

Feel as though you will be excising proper nouns in your sleep? Excellent; my work here is done. Night-night, John-John, and keep up the good work!

Or, to put it in more practical terms, if I promise to show you more properly-formatted pages while I’m at it, will you forgive my devoting tonight’s post to a foray into a notorious editorial pet peeve? What about if I talk about several?

It’s not as though there aren’t dozens from which to choose: as I may have horrified you withdepressed you into a stupor by bringing up mentioned in passing last time, those of us fortunate enough to read for a living are expected — and often rigorously trained — to notice patterns in writing. How often a manuscript uses the word blanched, for instance, or describes anything as being mauve.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with either word choice, mind you, when used sparingly. Surely I will astonish no one, however, if I suggest that your garden-variety reader might prefer not to see characters blanching at the sight of mauve objects on every other page. Adult readers, if you must know, tend to become bored by word and phrase repetition every bit as quickly as they lose interest in a slow-moving plot, dull explanation, or unsympathetic protagonist’s plight. In order to spare the reading public that pain, editors strive to catch not only larger narrative issues, but also redundancies, whether they be of concept, image, or phrase.

And, bless our hearts, we are seldom shy about pointing them out, sometimes as early as the second or third time an author uses a pet word or action. “For heaven’s sake, Mavis,” we have been known to scrawl in manuscript margins, “Jeremy has blanched, went pale, and felt the blood drain from his face already in a 4-page scene — need he also waste the reader’s time noticing his ashen face in the nearest mirror? What’s a mirror doing in the middle of a forest, anyway? And while we’re talking plausibility,” Mavis would be expected to turn the page over here, to read the editorial scribblings on the back of the page, “are you planning at some point to provide the reader with some explanation for all of the mauve leaves on the purple trees? Is the water supply in this forest somehow tainted? Are the trees subject to some sort of lavender mite infestation? Or have you perhaps forgotten that the trees on the other side of the world you’re describing were also on the mauve side?”

Given so much provocation on the page, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that one of the great long-term liabilities of reading for a living — or one of the great advantages, depending upon how one chooses to look at it — is that over time, the dedicated pro becomes decreasingly able to read anything without scrawling corrections in the margins. I’m not merely talking about manuscripts, synopses, and queries here, mind you, but all typed words on a page. The New York Times, for instance, once the standard of American prose, now seldom passes under my long-lashed eyes without picking up some entirely justified marginalia. Nor do magazines go unscathed: I’m looking at you, Radcliffe Quarterly.

Heck, I routinely take a corrective pen to menus, fliers, and wedding programs. One recent November, I had to be restrained bodily from correcting a grievous misprint on my ballot for a county election; the proper spelling would have confused the counting machine, I’m told.

But would that not have been preferable to asking the citizenry to select a superior court joge? Possibly to serve in mauve robes?

While in some walks of life, this level of habitual scrutiny might prove somewhat problematic, for professional readers like agents, editors, and contest judges (or, in this county, joges), it’s a positive boon. So what if in some benighted professions, it is neither expected nor considered particularly sane to look one’s coworker in the eye and say, “I like the content of you’re saying, Ziggy, but the fact that you uttered the word exciting fourteen times over the course of a six-minute speech, insisted upon using impact as a verb, and failed to define a good third of your basic terms detracted from your presentation’s effectiveness,” without finding oneself cordially disinvited from all future meetings? Someone has to defend the language. And by gum, if that means rending our garments and wailing to the heavens, “You’ve used this metaphor twice in 137 pages! And phrased it almost identically each time, you…you?torturer,” well, we’re up to the task.

I see some of you blanching, doubtless at the thought of that manuscript you recently sent out to the agent of your dreams. Well might you turn pale, ashen-faced ones. If the same metaphor graced page 1 and page 241, a good editor would catch it. So is it really so much of a surprise that an even ordinarily conscientious agent — or, for that matter, Millicent, the agency screener — felt all of the blood draining from her face when that metaphor cropped up on pp. 1 and 5? Or — sacre bleu! — twice on page 1?

Half the good professional readers I know would not only have become impatient at any of these levels of metaphor repetition — they would have leapt to the conclusion that the writer was repeating himself so much on purpose. Clearly, this is an authorial plot to get away with lazy writing. As opposed to, say, an authorial failure to recognize that his pet phrase of today was also the pet phrase of three months, eight days, and sixteen hours ago.

How could you? You know how much such things upset Millicent.

Actually, you probably didn’t, at least when you first began to write. Until a writer has enjoyed the incomparable pleasure of having her work dissecteddisemboweled subjected to professional critique, she tends not to have any idea of how closely an agent or editor is likely to read, much less a Millicent. As we discussed yesterday, the overwhelming majority of first-time queriers and submitters fully expect their pages to be read with, if not a completely charitable eye, than at least a willingness to look past little things like conceptual redundancy and an over-reliance upon a select group of particularly nice words. It’s the overall writing that counts, right?

Can you hear Millicent giggling? From a professional reader’s perspective, the very notion that repetitious word choice, recycled notions, or even frequent typos would not be considered part of the authorial voice being offered in a submission is pretty funny. A screener can judge writing only by what’s on the manuscript page, after all. And is Millicent really so wrong to believe that a manuscript in which every inanimate object is apparently mauve-tinted might be indicative of a slight compositional problem?

Then, too, most writers radically underestimate how good a well-trained professional reader’s memory for text will be. Remember, Millicent is usually in training to become either an agent, who would be expected to read a client’s fourth revision and be able to tell how it had changed from the three previous drafts, or an editor, who might conceivably find himself telling a bestselling author, “By jingo, Maurice, I’m not going to let you do it! You used precisely that simile in Book I of this five-part series; you can’t reuse it in Book V!”

Oh, you think I’m exaggerating, do you? Earlier today, I found my text-addled mind drifting back to a novel-cum-memoir I had read, I kid you not, in junior high school. And not merely because Memorial Day is a natural time to consider the noble calling of memoir-writing. A pivotal scene in that book, I felt, would provide such a glorious illustration of a common narrative mistake — both in manuscripts and in queries, as it happens — that I just had to drop our series-in-progress and track down the book.

Yes, yes, I know: sometimes, even other editors are surprised at how well I remember text. A few years ago, when my own memoir was lumbering its way through the publication process, my acquiring editor scrawled in my margins, “Oh, yeah, right — you remember a biography of the Wright Brothers that you read in the third grade? Prove it!” I was able not only to give him a chapter breakdown of the book, but tell him the publisher and correctly identify the typeface.

That’s how little girls with braids grow up to be editors, in case you had been wondering. If anyone wants to talk about the estimable Katharine Wright Haskell, apparently the only member of the Wright family bright enough to realize that heaving the first airplane off the ground might be of more significance if somebody bothered to alert the media, I’m still prepared and raring to go.

So I had good reason to believe that my recollection of a fictionalized memoir ostensibly written by a childhood friend of Joan of Arc was reasonably accurate. A lighthearted burrow through the roughly two thousand volumes I carted up from California after my mother moved from my childhood home, so she would have to tote only the remaining eight thousand with her (long story), and voil?! The very pages I had in mind.

Care to guess whether I’d remembered the font correctly?

I’m delighted that I did, as this excerpt provides excellent examples of the kind of narrative missteps that Millicent thinks so many of you do on purpose, just to annoy her. For starters, it exhibits the all-too-common narrative trick of echoing the verbal habit of using and as a substitute for a period in first-person narration, in a misguided attempt to make the narrative voice sound more like everyday speech. It can work, but let’s face it, quite a bit of everyday speech is so repetitious that it would be stultifying if transcribed directly to the printed page.

It also, you will be pleased to hear, beautifully demonstrates another classic memoir bugbear: telling an anecdote on the page as one might do out loud at a cocktail party, with practically every sentence a summary statement. (Hey, there’s a reason that show, don’t tell is such a pervasive piece of editorial feedback.) And, most common of all in both memoir and fictional first-person narratives, the pages in question much character development for anyone but the protagonist.

All sounds pretty terrible, doesn’t it? Actually, the scene isn’t badly written; the aforementioned garden-variety reader might not even have noticed some of these problems. Nor, unfortunately, would most aspiring writers prior to submission, for the exceedingly simple reason that far too few of them ever actually sit down and read their work beginning to end, as any other reader would. The writer already knows what’s on the page, right?

Or does he? My guess is that in this instance, the writer had very little idea that what he was slapping on the page was even vaguely problematic.

But you shall judge for yourself. To render the parallels to what Millicent sees on a daily basis more obvious, as well as to continue our exercises in learning to know properly-formatted manuscript pages when we see ‘em, I’m presenting that memorable scene here in standard format. As always, my blogging program is for some reasons best known to itself a trifle hostile to page shots, so if you are having trouble reading individual words, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the images.

Come on, admit it — while you might have excused all of those ands if you had heard this tale told out loud, they’re a trifle eye-distracting on the page, are they not? Ditto with the word repetition — could this author possibly have crammed any more uses of to be, to get, or to see into these three pages? And don’t even get me started on concept repetition.

I sense those of you committed to the noble path of writing memoir — or writing reality-based fiction — shifting uncomfortably in your chairs. “But Anne,” you protest, averting your eyes, “this isn’t the powerful negative example you led us to expect. I get what you mean about the sheer volume of ands, but other than that, there’s nothing wrong with the narrative voice here, given that this is a memoir. Isn’t part of the point of any memoir that the voice does sound like someone might speak? Is that not, in fact, one of the charms of first-person narration in general?”

Well, yes, but just as an event’s having actually occurred in real life (and it’s true, too!) does not necessarily mean that it will inevitably strike the reader as plausible on the page, first-person narration’s reading like everyday speech does not guarantee readability. In print, narrative chattiness may work against the reader’s enjoyment, because chatty people, like the rest of us, reuse words and phrases so darned much. Even talented verbal anecdotalists seldom embellish their tales with the level of detail that the most threadbare of written accounts would require. And funny out loud, let’s face it, does not always equal funny on the page.

Which is to say: as delightful as our example above might have been tumbling out of the mouth of a gifted storyteller, as a story on a page, it’s lacking quite a few elements. A sense of place, for one — is there a reason, the reader must wonder, not to give us some sense of what either the woods or the village were like? If both are left so completely to the reader’s imagination, is there not some danger that a Millicent fresh from polishing off the manuscript before this one might automatically assume that those trees were mauve, and those villages occupied by the wan?

Oh, you thought I’d dropped that running joke? In a blog, I can get away with going back to that same well this often. How many times, though, do you think I could revisit the joke in a book before the reader got bored? Or Millicent became irritated?

While you’re pondering those troubling questions, let’s return to our example. How else does it fall short?

Well, as so often happens in memoir, we’re just told that the action is happening here or there, rather than shown what those places were like. And lest anyone be tempted to shout out that old writing truism, “But it’s stylish to leave something to the reader’s imagination!, let me ask you: based upon the pages above, could you tell me where these people are with enough specificity that a reader would be able to feel like she’s there?

“But that’s not fair!” I would not blame you for shouting indignantly. “It’s the writer’s job to establish a sense of place, not the reader’s job to guess.”

Precisely what Millicent would say. She would object, and rightly, to this scene’s providing her with too little description to enable her to picture Joan and her young friends operating within an environment. Nor are those friends fleshed out much, either in character or physical trait.

Heck, poor Millie doesn’t even get to see the frightening Benoist: instead, the memoirist merely asserts repeatedly that he and Joan were getting closer, without showing us what that have looked like to a bystander. Like, say, the narrator of the scene.

Speaking of the narrator, were you able to glean much of a sense of who he is as a person? How about what his relationship is to Joan? Are you even sure of their respective ages? Any idea what year it is? Heck, if you did not already know that the girl would grow up to be the patron saint of France — actually, one of four, but Joan of Arc is certainly the best known in this country — would anything but the children’s names tip you off about what part of the world these characters inhabit?

While I’m asking so many rhetorical questions in a row — another occupational hazard, I’m afraid; margins absorb them like a sponge does water — let me ask a more fundamental one: did you notice that although this excerpt is apparently about how the village’s children reacted to Joan, there’s practically no character development for her at all?

That’s at least marginally problematic, in a book entitled — wait for it — PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC. What, we are left to wonder, does she look like? Why doesn’t she stand up to her playmates (beyond, of course, the justification of being “so girlish and shrinking in all ways”) or, failing that, why doesn’t she simply walk away from the nasty little beasts?

And don’t stand there telling me that the narrator had no choice in the matter, because that’s how it really happened. Yes, a memoir or fact-based fictional story should be true, but it also has to be both interesting in the page and plausible. Reality, unfortunately, is not always plausible; it’s the writer’s job to make it so on the page.

Which begs another editorial question: why can’t a kid brave enough to face down the village madman’s axe (or ax, depending upon where it falls in this passage; the error is in the book in front of me), a rather interesting thing for a person to do, come up with more revealing answers to questions than a simple yes? This is another notorious editorial pet peeve: almost without exception, the least character-revealing way for anyone to answer a yes-or-no question is with — again, wait for it — a simple yes or no.

Are some of you writers of the real blanching now? “But Anne,” you gasp, clutching your ashen cheeks so heavily drained of blood, “people actually do answer questions that way! And isn’t the point of written dialogue to reproduce the feel of actual speech?”

Well, that’s one of the points of dialogue. Another is not to bore the reader to death, isn’t it? And, if at all possible, it should be entertaining.

Just holding a tape recorder up to nature tends not to be the surest means of hitting any of those excellent goals. Why? Chant it with me now: most everyday speech is repetitious.

I can stand here and keep saying that as long as necessary, people. Again and again and again.

As we may see in the scene above, a character that keeps saying nothing but “Yes” isn’t exactly thrilling the reader with deep insight into her thought processes. Or even into the scene itself: little Joan is not, after all, a hostile witness in a murder trial, but a child talking with her playmates. Wouldn’t it ultimately be more realistic, then, if she sounded like the latter?

Speaking of realism, would it be too much to ask the narrator to explain why the villagers left an axe lying anywhere near the madman’s cage in the first place? Might not the locals’ efforts have been more productively expended making sure he can’t get out than chopping off his fingers?

And yes, in response to what half of you just thought: this is precisely the kind of thing an editor would have gripped her pen angrily and inked into the margins of a manuscript. Not because she’s mean, but because she’s trying to help the writer give the reader a more enjoyable reader experience.

That’s a noble calling, too, you know. But in the unlikely event that some writer out there might care less about the moral beauty of Millicent and her ilk’s devotion to textual excellence than how to worm his way past it in order improve his submission’s chances of getting picked up by an agency, let me hasten to add that the sooner a writer learns to read his own manuscript the way a professional reader would, the easier he will find self-editing. Not to mention being able to catch the Millicent-irritants that can prompt a screener or contest judge to stop reading.

In the interest of helping you fine people develop that ability, let me ask you another question about today’s example: if you had previously known absolutely nothing about what the what the real-life Jeanne d’Arc achieved, wouldn’t you find it at least a trifle too pat that her playmates choose to picture her doing more or less what she grew up to do — and to laugh at her about it? If the girl had suggested this role herself, it might merely have been not-particularly-subtle foreshadowing, but honestly, can you think of any reason to include this at all except to make the reader feel cleverer than St. Joan’s playmates?

Millicent wouldn’t be able to think of one. Neither would most professional readers; it’s our job to deplore this sort of narrative ham-handedness.

“Just how ill-informed would a reader have to be not to find that first bit clumsy?” we mutter into our much-beloved coffee mugs. “Isn’t it safe to assume that anyone who would pick up a book about Joan of Arc would know that she lead an army and was burned at the stake, even if that reader knew nothing else about her? And if your garden-variety reader knows that much, isn’t it an insult to his intelligence to drop a giant sign reading Hey, dummy, this is foreshadowing?”

Was that mighty gust of wind that just whipped the cosmos the sound of half of the memoirists out there huffing with annoyance, or was it merely the first-person novelists sighing gustily? “But Anne,” both groups think loudly in unison, rather like the remarkably collective-minded children in the anecdote above, “this is how I was taught to write first-person narration. It’s supposed to sound exactly like a real person’s speech. So why shouldn’t St. Joan’s unnamed childhood buddy sound like anybody else telling anecdotes out loud?”

A couple of reasons, actually. Yes, good first-person narration takes into account the narrator’s individual speech patterns; no dialogue should sound like just anybody. Which is precisely the problem with all of those yeses, right? All by themselves, yes and no are generally presumed to mean the same thing, regardless of who is saying them. So, like polite spoken clich?s of the “Excuse me” and “I’m so sorry for your loss” ilk, they are too generic to convey personalized content.

Strong dialogue also typically reflects the narrator’s social status and education, personal prejudices, and what s/he could conceivably know in the situation at hand. And then there are those pesky individual quirks and, yes, the century in which s/he lived.

So I ask you, first-person writers: just how does the narrative voice in this passage indicate that this particular anecdote took place not too long after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415? As opposed to, say, the 1890s, when this account was first published?

And if you were tempted even for a nanosecond to mutter in response, “Well, if the 1980s is when readers would have been seeing this dialogue, sounding like that just would have seemed normal,” let me ask a follow-up question: if this scene were narrated in the voice of a pre-teen texting this to a friend today, would that make this scene ring truer to today’s readers? Or would it merely read as though the writer either hadn’t thought much about how Joan and her friends might have communicated with one another — or was presuming that today’s readers were not capable of following any type of dialogue than their own?

Those of us who read for a living have a term for that kind of assumption: insulting the reader’s intelligence. We often find ourselves scrawling it in margins.

How often, you ask, your faces a mask of pallid horror? Well, operating on the assumption that internal monologues have both always sounded pretty much like modern speech and don’t vary much from individual to individual is as common a mistake in first-person narratives as having all teenage characters sigh and roll their eyes is in YA submissions. Yes, some people do think and talk that way, but must everybody? Should Helen of Troy formulate her innermost thoughts in the same way as, say, Eleanor Roosevelt, Louisa May Alcott, or Confucius?

There’s a dinner party, eh? I’ll bring the stuffed grape leaves.

Doesn’t it make for more interesting narration if your narrator’s speech bears at least some marks of time? And if she has some individual quirks of thought and expression?

Besides, if we are going to be true to the rules of first-person narration, shouldn’t we be objecting to how often our narrator here professes to read the other children’s minds — although, notably, not Joan’s? I don’t know about you, but I find that most of the time, my thoughts are located in my own head, not floating somewhere in the middle of a group of bystanders. Millicent, too, tends to regard her own thoughts as separate from other people’s. The inevitable consequence: characters who think together tend to annoy her, unless their shared brains crop up within science fiction or fantasy context, where they can be plausible.

That cast a different light upon the narrative choice here, doesn’t it? As an editor might well scrawl in the margin, are we supposed to believe that our narrator in this instance is a mind-reader, or that the local children were too simple-minded to be able to form individual opinions about what is going on in front of them? Is the narrator just not familiar enough with the individual characters to be able to guess how their thoughts might have differed, or, (turn page over here) since he’s of a different social class than they are — not abundantly apparent in this scene, is it? — does his reporting that they all thought the same way a function of his views of their training in rational thinking? Or does it indicate the opposite, that he feels so close to them that he presumes that his beloved friends and he could only have thought and felt identically?

“Or, Mark,” the editor might conclude, “did you originally write this scene in the third person, with an omniscient narrator that could plausibly read everyone’s thoughts? If so, you can’t legitimately endow your first-person narrator with that ability. Pick a narrative perspective and stick to it!”

In fairness to Mark, as well as all of the blanching first-person narrative writers out there, plenty of writers actually were taught to write first-person narration this way — in short stories in their high school English classes. And with good faith, too: in short bursts, run-on sentences do indeed come across as ordinary speech-like. In the published examples of this type of narration that tend to turn up in class, it’s not all that unusual for the author’s voice and the first-person narrator’s voice to merge into colloquial harmony.

Or, to put it another way, Mark Twain tends to sound like Mark Twain, for instance, no matter whose perspective is dominating a particular story. That’s part of his branding as an author, right, his distinctive narrative voice and humorous worldview?

Admittedly, adopting a chatty voice makes quite a bit of sense for narrative voice in memoir. The reader is going to have to like how the narrator/protagonist talks about her life well enough to want to follow the story for a few hundred pages, after all; we might as well get friendly. Yet in practice, the primary danger of relying on the repetitive phrasing, clich?s, and percussive and use to achieve realistic-sounding narrative cadence is precisely that it will put off the reader because as the pages pass, it can become, at the risk of repeating myself, rather boring.

Think about it: even if a memoir were being told as a collection of verbal anecdotes, wouldn’t you rather listen to a storyteller with some individual flair for phrasing, instead of someone who just sounded like everyone else? No matter how inherently exciting a personal story is, a great telling can make it better reading. So can a narrative voice reflective of the time, place, and society in which that tale takes place.

But just try telling that to Mark Twain — who, as the sharper-eyed among you may already have noticed, wrote the scene above, in what he considered his best book. Although that retrospective assessment is a trifle hard to take seriously, in light of the fact that he published the book both under a pen name and in serial form. Actually, he took it to even one more remove: he wrote a preface under a nom de plume, presenting himself as the translator of a memoir written by one of young Joan’s contemporaries.

Why go to all that trouble? Because by all accounts, he felt that the poor sales of THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER were largely attributable to his established audience’s expecting anything published under the name of Mark Twain to be a comedy. Good branding has its drawbacks for a creative artist.

Take that, purists who would like to believe that writing with an eye toward market concerns is a product of an increasingly cynical publishing industry over the last twenty or thirty years. Twain and his publisher worked out that tactic in the 1890s.

But I digress. As a reader, how well do you think his narrative choices worked here, either as fiction narration or as the memoir narration it originally professed to be? In your opinion as a writer, how do you feel about those slips into the first person plural — is the reader carried along with the we perspective as a narrative choice, as we were in Jeffrey Eugenides’ THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, or does it read like a perspective slip?

In today’s example, do you feel that the mostly distinctly modern narrative voice, coupled with the almost entirely uncritical view of Joan, was the best way to tell this tale? Reviewers in Twain’s time did not think so — they believed (and I must say I agreed with them back in junior high school) that a protagonist who never does anything wrong is a trifle on the dull side, as far as the reader is concerned. Twain’s Joan never sets a wee foot wrong; even in her earliest youth, he tells us, she raised her voice in anger only once, and even then it was to voice a patriotic thought.

A taciturnity unusual in a rabble-rouser, you must admit. Also an unusual characteristic for someone who challenged social norms enough for anyone to want to burn her at the stake: Twain’s narrator presents her as a quiet, universally beloved little girl. Butter, as folks used to say, would not melt in her mouth.

But is that how little girls with braids grow up to lead armies?

Twain evidently thought so. No matter how outside-the-box her observations or actions are shown to be (or, as we saw above, summarized to be), in this narrative, nothing she did or said from birth to the age of fourteen so much as ruffled the composure of the inhabitants of a querulous small village in wartime. Surprising, to say the least, in a young lady who by her own account had been engaging in frequent heart-to-heart chats with a couple of your more illustrious virgin martyrs since the age of twelve.

Perhaps the querulous small village where I spent my formative years was atypical, but I’m inclined to think that had I gone around snatching murder weapons from the clutches of local lunatics or holding confabs with deceased ancient Roman maidens, the locals might have had a thing or two to say about it. I’m also inclined to think that their observations would not have been entirely favorable, regardless of how winsome and girlish I might have been while disarming the maniac in question. It doesn’t strike me as the type of endeavor best undertaken in a party dress.

I’m not saying that Twain is necessarily factually incorrect about any of this; naturally, his best guess is as good as ours on a lot of these points. The little lady lived rather a long time ago, so the issue here is less historical accuracy than dramatic plausibility. Still, just because something really happened does not mean it will necessarily come across as plausible on the page; as agents like to say, it all depends on the writing.

As an editor, though, I think it was Uncle Mark’s job as a writer’s to make me believe his take on this. Presuming you agree with me — speak now or forever hold your peace — I ask you: was this narrative choice the best fit for the story he wanted to tell? And if not, should Millicent accept this manuscript?

Does the fact that a good third of you just began hyperventilating mean that it had not occurred to you that whether a story is not only well-written, but attacked from an appropriate narrative angle is a potential rejection trigger? It is, inevitably. Wouldn’t it have been nice if your last rejection letter had told you that, if Millicent or her boss thought that your first-person story would have worked better as a third-person narrative, or vice-versa?

Literary taste is, of course, to a very great extent individual, so only you can answer my question about Uncle Mark’s narrative choices to your own satisfaction. Am I correct in presuming, though, that you are at least a tiny bit curious about how an editor currently holding down the literary fort in the U.S. publishing world might respond to the choices he did make? Glad you asked. Let the scrawling begin!

What am I hoping you will take from this, you ask, eyes wide with horror and previously rosy cheeks drained of blood? Not merely that being a brilliant writer does not necessarily preclude turning out a clunker of a first draft from time to time — although that’s not a bad thing for aspiring writers to bear in mind. The popular conception of true literary talent’s consisting of letter-perfect creative phrasing dripping from one’s fingertips directly onto the page, with no further polishing necessary, each and every time, does not match up particularly well with reality. As any experienced editor could tell you, most of the books people regard as semi-miraculous productions of pure inspiration have actually been worked, reworked, and run past half a dozen critical readers.

And I mean critical readers. The kind who will remember what the author did in the same scene in each previous draft.

Remember that, please, the next time you’re struggling with a scene that just doesn’t seem to want to hit the page gracefully — or with much specificity. In moments like that, it can be very tempting to embrace the tack Twain did above, writing up the scene in summary form, with few vivid details, just to get the darned thing committed to paper as rapidly as humanly possible.

What makes me think that this was written quickly? Editorial instinct, mostly: I find it hard to believe that a humorist as gifted at reading out loud as I know Twain to have been would have killed the comedy — or bored the reader — with this much word repetition unless he was writing on a pretty tight deadline. Serialization tended to be submitted that way back then, you know, as Dickens would have been only too glad to tell you. Had Uncle Mark taken the time to revisit this scene and iron out its wrinkles, I don’t think there would have been quite so many references to eyes — and, frankly, I don’t think that he would have had his narrator faint at the climax of the scene. He was too good a storyteller.

But that choice certainly saved the author the trouble of having to figure out how the girl convinced the wild man to give up the axe, though, didn’t it? Trust me on this one: experienced editors — and Millicents — see this type of narrative shortcut often enough to recognize it for what it is.

So what should a savvy writer do when faced with this sort of first-draft dilemma? Go ahead, give in to temptation; there is value in getting a full scene on paper. Just make sure to set aside time later in the writing process to return to that scene and flesh it out.

Unless you would prefer to have your future editor bark at you, “This is lazy writing, Ambrose. Didn’t anybody ever tell you to show, don’t tell?”

Just in case nobody has yet snarled that in the general direction of your manuscript: show, don’t tell. Immerse your reader in sufficient details for her to be able to feel as though she is part of the scene, rather than leaving her to fill in the specifics for herself.

Oh, you don’t think that’s what Twain is doing here? Okay, rise from your chair, grab the nearest willing partner, and try to act out this interaction between young Joan and Benoist, based solely upon the choreography the narrator above chose to provide us:

She stood up and faced the man, and remained so. As we reached the wood that borders the grassy clearing and jumped into its shelter, two or three of us glanced back to see if Benoist was gaining on us, and this is what we saw — Joan standing, and the maniac gliding stealthily toward her with his axe lifted. The sight was sickening. We stood where we were, trembling and not able to move. I did not want to see murder done, and yet I could not take my eyes away. Now I saw Joan step forward to meet the man, though I believed my eyes must be deceiving me. Then I saw him stop. He threatened her with his ax, as if to warn her not to come further, but went steadily on, until she was right in front of him — right under his axe. Then she stopped, and seemed to begin to talk with him. It made me sick, yes, giddy, and everything swam around me, and I could not see anything for a time — whether long or brief I do not know. When this passed and I looked again, Joan was walking by the man’s side toward the village, holding him by his hand. The axe was in her other hand.

Not much practical guidance for the actors there, eh? Other than all of that seeing (a word most writers tend to overuse in early drafts, incidentally), the actual movements mentioned here are pretty routine: one party standing still, the other moving toward her. The mover threatens, but we are not told how. Admittedly, a lifted axe doesn’t have to move much to seem threatening, but did you notice how pretty much all of the sense of danger is conveyed via the narrator’s dread, rather than through showing the reader vivid, terrifying specifics? And how virtually all of that dread is summarized, rather than shown in any detail?

From an editorial perspective, that lack of specificity distances the reader from what should have been a thrilling scene: by leaving us to fill in the details, the narrator abdicates his proper role here. It’s his job to make us feel that we were there, or at least to show us the scene engagingly enough that we have that illusion.

Yes, he grounds us in his experience by telling us repeatedly that he is seeing this or that, and that these sights made him feel sick (and ultimately pass out). But great heavens, man, if you’re going to narrate a story like this, isn’t it your job to at least ask a bystander what happened, so you could share that information with the reader?

Don’t tell me that once you’ve seen one axe-wielding madman, you’ve seen ‘em all. As both a reader and an editor, I want to know what this particular madman looked, sounded, moved, smelled, and felt like. I want to know precisely what our heroine did that gave Benoist pause; I want to be shown how he crept up on her stealthily while apparently walking straight into her line of vision. And gosh darn it, I want to know how an axe of 1415 differed from one I might buy at the corner hardware store today.

Without those details, and phrased in fairly ordinary terms, this excerpt is indeed like everyday speech, in the negative sense, despite the inherently exciting subject matter. Substitute a memo-wielding boss for the axe-bearing madman, and this could have been an anecdote overheard in a coffee house after work, couldn’t it?

Please don’t limit your answer to a simple yes or no. I was hoping to learn something about you.

Distancing the reader from the action in this manner is an unfortunately common tactic in memoirs and first-person fictional narratives alike. Instead of showing the reader what happened through a fully realized scene, the narrator simply summarizes; rather than demonstrating relationship dynamics through dialogue or action, the narrator just sums up what was said. And by describing subsequent actions in the same words or in hackneyed terms (I believed my eyes must be deceiving me? Really, Mark?), the action may move forward, but the reader’s understanding of what’s going on does not.

Joan stood; Benoist glided. Then Joan stood while Benoist glided. Then she stopped — odd as the narrative had not shown her going forward. Then the narrator conveniently blacks out so we cannot see what is going on. Then the problem is solved. The end.

A bit mauve, isn’t it? Well might you turn pale.

Seldom is this the most interesting way to convey a story, in my experience. Like having characters answer yes-or-no questions with yes or no, as opposed to more detailed (and thus more character-revealing) responses, the summary route closes off story possibilities. And by definition, repeated phrasing adds nothing new to the scene.

Neither, incidentally, do all of those thens: logically, they are unnecessary. Why? Well, in a story in which events are being presented in chronological order, the occurrences in Sentence 1 are presumed to have happened before those in Sentence 2, which in turn came before what’s described in Sentence 3.

Thens, then, as we have seen them used in that last example, are logically redundant; most editors would advise you to reserve them for moments when what happens next is genuinely unexpected. Take a gander:

Joan stood; Benoist glided toward her with an axe. Then the Wright Brothers and their sister, Katherine, swooped through an opening in the forest canopy in a motorized glider to snatch the weapon away.

Admit it — you didn’t see that last twist coming, did you? As a reader, didn’t you get a kick out of that?

Remember, there’s more to telling a story than simply listing its events in the order they occurred. Racing from its beginning to its end may not be the best way to engage the reader. You want the journey to be both memorable and enjoyable, right? And if the narrative can manage either to surprise the reader with an unanticipated turn of events, delight her with astonishing imagery, or intrigue her with beautiful phrasing — ideally, all three — all the better.

Before I release you to ponder the challenges of expanding a first-person narrative from the anecdotal level into a completely inhabited scene, I want to talk about another common faux pas: the further distancing effect of the narrative’s reminding us repeatedly that the narrator is seeing, hearing, or observing this or that. Obviously — at least from a professional reader’s perspective — if an action or object is depicted in a first-person narrative, the narrator perceived it; otherwise, she could not legitimately bring it up, right?

So when Twain’s narrator tells us repeatedly that he saw Joan do this or Benoist do that, it’s logically redundant. Of course, he saw it: he was standing right there. Why bother to remind the reader of that self-evident fact? Or, to put it as a garment-rending professional reader might, does the author think the reader is too brain-dead to remember who the narrator is and that he is present?

Oh, you don’t want the pros to take every word you commit to the page that seriously? But it’s how they show their respect for your eventual readers!

And for your literary gifts. Again: if it’s on the page and the writer appears to possess even the slightest vestige of talent, Millicent is going to assume that you put it there on purpose. She’s also going to believe, with good reason, that if a writer has set up rules for how the story is to be told — in this case, from the point of view of a childhood friend of Joan’s, and only from his perspective — the narrative will follow those rules consistently.

This, too, trips up quite a lot of memoirists and other first-person narrator-wranglers. Once a narrative is committed to a single perspective, it cannot report anything outside of it without shattering the illusion of a limited point of view. Thus, when the narrator slips into the first person plural, informing us that we saw this or thought that, it’s jarring to the reader’s sensibilities.

And when, like Twain’s narrator, he professes to know what we all are thinking…well, let’s just say that maybe Joan isn’t the only one who needs to be worrying about going on trial for dabbling in the supernatural. Unless the narrative establishes some means by which a first-person narrator could possibly have reliable insight into other characters’ thoughts and feelings, he should really stick to his own.

If his thoughts and feelings are somehow different from every Tom, Dick, and Benoist who might be hanging around in the same place at the same time, great. If he can manage to express them in language evocative, memorable, and tailored to his individual worldview, though, even better. And if he can work in a little character development, perhaps through revealing dialogue, terrific.

Which is not a bad definition of memoir voice, if you think about it: a narrator with a strong personality and specific worldview recounting situations of significance to an overall dramatic story arc in language and from a perspective unique to the teller. If every sentence of your memoir — and, to bring this back to our series-in-progress, every sentence of your query’s book description — does not rise to that level, you might want to think about revising it.

Millicent will thank you. So will your readers.

So Mark, darling, as much as I admire your writing in general and short stories in particular, if I were your editor — oh, you thought that editors don’t live in the hope that this type of activity would be the first, best use of a time machine? — I would insist that you sat down and revised these three pages. Actually, I would do it because I admire your writing: your narrative voice, even in this rather serious book, is better than what we’re seeing here.

And that axe you keep telling us you’re seeing, narrator? Try to think of it as your editor, chopping away all of that phrasing and conceptual redundancy. Trust your reader’s intelligence a bit more, please.

Do bear in mind, too, that while reality itself can be convoluted and devoid of point, readers have a right to expect a book based upon real events to be a good story possessed of an identifiable story arc. It should be dramatically satisfying. And if the real-life version is not, believe me, Millicent isn’t going to be inclined to take that as an excuse.

No need to go pale about this. You can do it. But in order to pull it off successfully, you’re going to have to be able to read your work not only like a writer, but also like a reader.

Oh, it feels good to be delving back into craft. Would anyone mind if I continued to keep standard format illustration on the back burner for a bit and made narrative voice my topic of the week?

Actually, that’s a rhetorical question, come to think of it. Keep up the good work!

Okay, I’ll confess it: I’m known for my enthusiasm about fabulous writing and the fine people that produce it. Guilty as charged. I’m also, I hear, notorious for waxing especially rhapsodic when a good writer who has paid her dues first breaks into print. Yet even for me, a phrase like particularly overjoyed is a rarity.

What’s sent me into overjoy overload, you ask? This time, I’m announcing a fabulous novel by a great writer who has paid her dues — and who also happens to have been my college roommate. So if you think I’m not going to be tap-dancing on the rooftops about this one, well, all I can say is that my neighbors have been anxiously spreading nets under their eaves for weeks, in anticipation of this moment.

Algonquin Books will be bringing the book out in April. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

It’s 1943. As air-raid sirens blare in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, eight-year-old Saburo walks through the peach forests of Taoyuan. The least favored son of a Taiwanese politician, Saburo is in no hurry to get home to the taunting and abuse he suffers at the hands of his parents and older brother. In the forest he meets Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise. Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival.

Set in a tumultuous and violent period of Taiwanese history — as the Chinese Nationalist Army lays claim to the island and one autocracy replaces another–The Third Son tells the story of lives governed by the inheritance of family and the legacy of culture, and of a young man determined to free himself from both.

In Saburo, author Julie Wu has created an extraordinary character, a gentle soul forced to fight for everything he’s ever wanted: food, an education, and his first love, Yoshiko. A sparkling, evocative debut, it will have readers cheering for this young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.

Having gotten a sneak peek at this lyrical novel, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Double that recommendation for those of you currently pursuing the difficult-but-rewarding path of literary fiction: I think you’re going to be interested in the lovely things the language does in Julie’s talented hands.

I’m just a trifle excited, in short, that her work is about to be available to a wider audience. To celebrate, I’ve decided to rerun one of my all-time favorite guest posts, by, you guessed it, Julie Wu’s. I first ran it in 2011, soon after Algonquin acquired the novel.

I think it might resonate particularly well right now, as I know so many of you have spent the first three weeks of January (insert martyred sigh here) frantically querying agencies already dealing with what I like to call the New Year’s Resolution Avalanche. Still others have, bless your hearts, been champing at the bit, waiting for half the aspiring writers in North America to work that first querying enthusiasm of the year out of collective system.

But I’m correct, am I not, in saying that every single one of you has been gnawing your nails, worrying about whether your manuscript or book proposal is polished enough to make the grade? That’s completely normal; even the best books have to run the rejection gamut. Yet it’s amazing how seldom published authors speak frankly to those facing the prospect for the first time about something everyone who writes for a living knows is the case: facing rejection is an inescapable fact of the writing life.

Stop shaking your head — it’s true. Every single living author you admire has had to deal with it. What’s more, every living author you admire has been precisely where you are now.

If you doubt that any of these writing woes have been under-discussed, let me ask you: when’s the last time you heard a writer mention rejection or struggling to wrest writing time from his busy schedule as anything but a complaint?

What I like so much about today’s post is how unblinkingly it examines something else writers published and unpublished alike seldom like to admit: many a great premise has been lost to posterity for lack of necessary revision. It’s easy to lose faith in mid-revision — and even easier to reject the notion of revision at all.

Advance disclaimer: I’m not the roommate mentioned in the piece; I couldn’t throw a pot to save my life. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I should tell you that Julie is the kind soul that first introduced me to that modern miracle, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, a fact that in no way affects my estimation of her literary talents. A Boston-area native, she also probably saved my life by instructing this rural California girl on the delicate art of crossing Massachusetts Avenue on foot without being flattened like a pancake.

The local joke at the time was that Cambridge traffic tended to separate Harvard students into two categories: the quick and the dead. So if you have ever enjoyed a post here at Author! Author!, Julie’s teaching me to dash through traffic unscathed is partially to thank.

Please join me, then, in welcoming Julie Wu. Take it away, Julie!

My roommate once made a clay pot in art school. Threw it on the wheel, drew up its walls between the tips of her fingers, fired it, glazed it. When she and her classmates held up their finished pots, gleaming and beautiful, the instructor led the students to a pit and ordered them to throw down their pots. The point was, he said, not to become attached to a particular piece of work. You can always make more.

Some students cried. My roommate was traumatized, still bitter about the experience years later when she told me about it.

Hearing her story made my stomach twist. I had written a few short stories, and they were my precious babies, conjured up as I sat cross-legged in the dark in an apartment overlooking the Hudson River. My stories were praised in student workshops, but their strengths were no more robust or reproducible than the street lights’ glinting on the water’s surface. Even after the literary magazine rejections came in, I revised only a sentence here or there, hoping that would be enough.

Because I was afraid that if I revised more, I would ruin what was good and never get it back again. I was one of those art students, crying and clutching my pot at the edge of the pit.

Here’s the thing: that instructor was right. It has taken me ten years to understand that. Make one beautiful pot–maybe you were lucky. Make another from the ground up, and another, still more beautiful, and you are an artist. It takes practice, study, the making and smashing of many pots beautiful, average, and ugly, to really know that clay, to know exactly how to push your hands into it to get what you want.

It took me ten years to understand, because it took me ten years to write my first novel. I revised it countless times–a little when it first didn’t sell, then more and more. Eventually, I changed its structure, its point of view, its tone, its style. With each revision I received comments and started over, page one. Each time, I learned more, until I could revise without fear. And it was then that I sold the book.

In writing we have a safety net: the computer. Open a new file and you have smashed your pot and kept a picture of it at the same time. How to proceed at that point is a study in humility, in open-mindedness, in self-examination. It’s remembering all the advice you read about in the craft books–that you must have an interesting protagonist, a need, lots of conflict–and admitting you need to take that advice yourself. It’s hearing all the feedback from your readers–that the protagonist is unsympathetic, that nothing happens, that what happens is implausible–and admitting that they are true. It’s realizing that there’s power in depth, and that depth is a function of your narrative arc. It’s an equation of equal parts emotion and mechanics, and it’s fueled by that elusive beast, imagination.

After so many years, book one is done. I’m thinking about book two. I’ve got clay in my hands again, but I feel different now. Because I’m not afraid. Because I know now I can make a pretty good pot. And because if it doesn’t turn out well, I don’t have to cry. I can throw it into the pit, and make something better.

Before I launch into today’s festivities, please join me in applauding a longtime member of the Author! Author! community, J. A. Turley — better known around here as John — for publishing his gripping narrative nonfiction account of the Gulf oil spill, The Simple Truth: BP’s Macondo Blowout. Congratulations, John!

It’s also, you may be interested to know, available as an e-book. Here’s the blurb:

THE SIMPLE TRUTH: BP’s Macondo Blowout dramatizes through narrative nonfiction the drilling of the 3-1/2-mile-deep exploration well and the evolving decisions and events that led to the disaster. The story is structured around drilling data, federal and corporate investigations, and deposed evidence. Fictional characters are surrogates for surviving offshore personnel and the eleven who died. Readers — regardless of location or vocation — are along for the ride, their learning curves gentle but high. The extensively-referenced nonfiction epilogue documents the human, operating, and engineering causes of the disaster, unique among published books.

If you’re having trouble reading that, try holding down the COMMAND key and pressing + to enlarge the image. I would suggest doing the same with his contest synopsis:

As the prize for winning the non-easily categorized-fiction category of the Rings True contest, I both posted feedback on these two pages and sat down with the talented and generous Heidi Durrow, author of my favorite literary fiction debut of the last decade, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, to talk about what might happen next with this book. At the time, John was presenting the story as fiction; here’s what Heidi and I had to say about that.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, there was an even better reason to consider marketing this story as nonfiction: John happens to be a genuine expert on his subject matter. Take a gander at this truly impressive platform:

J.A. (John) Turley writes fun mysteries (winner, Colorado Gold, 2008). But in 2010, he turned to solving the serious mystery of the cause of the BP blowout. His writing platform is fueled by engineering degrees, Harvard Business School, a three-year petroleum-engineering professorship, and 25 years of applicable oil-and-gas-industry experience. His assessment of the blowout — documented in THE SIMPLE TRUTH — is therefore from multiple perspectives: academic, on-the-rig, petroleum engineering, drilling management, executive, and as a writer. Turley is a professional speaker on the topic.

See my point? While John’s direct personal and professional experience would — and I’m sure did — inform his earlier treatment of this story as fiction, he could — and does — also write about it as nonfiction. Choosing to revise the book into narrative nonfiction, then, made abundant sense.

I’m in the process of blandishing John into sharing the practicalities behind that shift in narrative voice and worldview in a future guest blog, so for now, I shall content myself with celebrating his achievement in pulling of that difficult writing trick. In the meantime, though, I would like to spend the rest of today’s post talking about the challenges of writing the real — and of marketing it to both agents and potential readers.

As we discussed last time, writing about reality can take quite a few forms — in descending order of popularity with aspiring writers, as everyday life interpreted on the pages of a novel, as memoir, and as narrative nonfiction. In any book category, it’s hard to pull off well.

You’d never know that, though, from how little we writers talk amongst ourselves about the often rather nebulous line between writing a truthful account of something that actually happened for inclusion in a fiction manuscript and writing about the same occurrence — or story, or characters — in memoir or narrative nonfiction. And that’s interesting because, let’s face it, most writers start out writing something at least tangentially based upon their own experiences.

In fact, until fairly recently, it was simply accepted that a first novel that was not explicitly aimed at an established genre audience must necessarily be autobiographical — if not in its entirety, than at least in inspiration. The reading public frequently had good reason to leap to that assumption, of course: for well over a century, publishers have promoted books, and authors have spoken about them in interviews, as based on the writers’ personal experiences.

If we hear anything to the contrary, it’s usually because the factual accuracy of such claims have been called into question: when specific scenes in James Frey’s memoir, A MILLION LITTLE PIECES, were alleged to have been fictionalized, for instance, or some of the real-life inspirations for a few of David Sedaris’ personal essays (variously categorized as narrative nonfiction and humor) claim that things didn’t really shake out so hilariously in the moment.

Behind the scenes, of course, literary types often rolled their eyes over these often very literal-minded allegations. What did people think, that authors simply stood around and created transcripts of real life for publication? Was the possibility of an individual perspective’s creating a different narrative than what someone else might remember honestly that far-fetched? And if readers found, say, Jerzy Kosinski’s harrowing debut novel, THE PAINTED BIRD, more compelling if they thought every syllable was based upon a specific actual event, could you really say that they were harmed by that belief?

All excellent rhetorical questions, of course. That does not mean, however, that writers would not benefit from some serious discussion amongst ourselves of the genuinely knotty writing problem of how much literal truth belongs on the fiction page vs. the nonfiction page.

So where do our chats tend to focus instead? Precisely where the prevailing social expectations about truth in writing would lead us to predict they would. Memoirists and narrative nonfiction writers frequently worry that readers will not believe they are telling the truth on the page — or that others who also lived through the experiences in question will challenge their perspectives. Perfectly reasonable fears, of course: especially in the post-A MILLION LITTLE PIECES environment, nonfiction writers — and publishers — have been lighting rods for lawsuit threats on both counts. The fact that few such cases ever seem to make it to court, or even to the suit-filing stage, though, might help set a few hearts at rest.

Novelists, on the other hand, often spend sleepless nights fretting that someone might think their fictional protagonists are — gasp! — themselves. Again, it’s not an unreasonable fear; fiction authors’ kith and kin are notorious for scanning first novels, searching for cameos. In my experience, those kith and kin tend to be rather more likely to become disgruntled if their beloved friend/relative/vague acquaintance doesn’t write about them than if she does, but still, the fear of being accused of holding a real person up to public ridicule — or, as the charge more commonly runs, of depicting an event on the fiction page in a manner contrary to the actual facts — is pervasive.

Interestingly, aspiring writers frequently don’t think at all about the other possibility: because readers often presume that first novels are autobiographical at some level, genuinely creative writing won’t receive the credit it deserves. Historically, female authors have been particularly susceptible to this charge — and to this marketing strategy. PEYTON PLACE author Grace Metalious shot to fame on the presumption that everything in her book was true, as did LITTLE WOMEN‘s Louisa May Alcott. Both spent the rest of their lives impatiently answering questions from people unclear on the concept of fiction based upon fact: to the literal-minded, apparently, a story is either 100% true or it isn’t.

But try telling that to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who spent the rest of her long life as a prolific novelist, short story writer, and encyclopedist dodging questions from eager readers and journalists demanding to know whether her husband or Lord Byron had actually brought a corpse back from the dead. FRANKENSTEIN was her first novel; it must have been fact-based, right?

And quick: name one of her other novels — or any of her genre-defining short stories, for that matter. Even those devoted to FRANKENSTEIN have often never heard of them. Makes one wonder whether the page space devoted to speculating about her kith and kin’s truck with the dead might have been more productively used, doesn’t it?

Heck, I’ve found myself on the receiving end of this presumption. I once spent a fruitless hour listening to an editor interested in a novel of mine tiptoe around asking me to revise a particularly painful scene in which my protagonist found her mother passed out in a hotel room next to a barely-clothed baritone and a plethora of prescription bottles. She did not want to hurt my feelings, she eventually admitted, in requesting I alter the facts of what obviously had been an extremely painful event for me to have lived.

Except, of course, I hadn’t lived through anything remotely like it. I like to think that it’s a compliment to my writing that the editor so firmly believed I had wrested a painful memory from the depths of my reluctant soul to share with the fiction-reading public, but on a practical level, it proved problematic that no amount of explanation could possibly convince her that I didn’t regularly cart passed-out relatives to the emergency room to have their respective stomachs pumped. The scene felt real, the editor reasoned, so it must really have happened to me.

My agent knew otherwise, of course, but all she did was giggle on her end of the three-way call. She’d seen this happen to too many of her novel-writing clients.

Which, frankly, tends to puzzle writers. To a fiction writer, the truth of a story runs on any number of levels, right? And, as we discussed last time, good memoir and narrative nonfiction alike must necessarily be selective in what aspects of real life they include in their narratives. In fiction and nonfiction alike, an indiscriminate collection of facts does not a compelling or readable storyline make. Part of the art of storytelling lies in deciding what to leave out — and what to leave fuzzy.

Nor, contrary to popular opinion, does a story’s being based upon real events necessarily render it more interesting to readers. Sometimes, it does, of course, particularly if the happenings and characters in question are public figures, or if the book exposes a fundamental misconception about a well-respected institution or practice.

Most first novels, however, aim for neither. In depicting the writer’s real life, these manuscripts are typically shooting for the depiction of subjective reality, not a blistering exposé of sociocultural norms. And while it is fact possible — indeed, likely — that writing about the people you know and/or the things that you did will irk at least one person already acquainted with you and/or those events, your garden-variety fiction reader will simply be reading it as a story.

Why, then, do so many aspiring writers talk about their work — and, more importantly for our ongoing conversation here at Author! Author!, present their work to agents — as though the most important thing to know about a novel is whether it is based on actual events? Or that a memoir is about a memoirist’s life? Or that in either case, the names of real people have been changed?

Seriously, agents see writers label their books this way all the time. Millicent the agency screener’s inbox is constantly barraged with queries containing assertions like this:

Although this novel is fiction, it is taken from something that actually happened to me in real life…

Or this:

Some might say that this could never happen, but THINLY-DISGUISED AUTOBIOGRAPHY is based on a true story, with the names changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

Or this:

Ripped from the headlines, JUMPING ON THE BANDWAGON is a fictionalized account of a story that dominated the media for a month. Based upon accurate facts, this novel speculates upon what really happened.

Or, believe it or not, this:

This is a true memoir, depicting events as I lived them.

A pop quiz for those of you who recall last year’s Querypalooza: why might any of these statements lead to Millicent’s rolling her submission-reddened eyes — and possibly not reading the rest of the query?

Award yourself a gold star for the day if you instantly leapt to your feet, shouting, “All novels are fiction, so that first statement is conceptually redundant!” You’re quite right, yellers: it’s quite unnecessary to inform an agent who handles fiction for a living that, by definition, a novel is fiction. Millicent may be trusted to be fully aware of this.

Even in the outrageously unlikely event that she were unfamiliar with the concept of a novel, though, what about learning that Example #1’s manuscript is taken from something that actually happened to {the writer} in real life would cause Millicent to regard the story with more favorable eyes? Is this a marketing suggestion, and if so, what group of established readers does this novelist will respond to the facts of the story?

That last is not a frivolous question, you know. If John had chosen to bring out THE SIMPLE TRUTH as fiction, he could legitimately have made the case that the high level of public and media interest (not the same thing, by the way, although the terms are often used interchangeably) would have piqued readers’ interest. Because the BP oil spill was a major news story for so long and remains a serious issue for a large portion of the country, it may well be why many readers first pick up the book.

That instant oh, I’ve heard about that! response won’t necessarily be evoked by a personal story, though, will it? I can easily imagine a well thought-out marketing campaign to reach potential readers who have lived through similar events, but in a slice-of-life novel, isn’t part of the point that the narrative focus is not on widely-advertised, society-wide phenomena, but upon the small, closely-observed details of actual life?

See the problem? If you’re writing a slice-of-life novel, anyone familiar with that kind of writing will expect it to involve those closely-observed details — and will not be astonished to learn that some or even all of them cropped up in your everyday life. So how precisely could informing Millicent of that overall definition of that type of writing cause your query to stand out from every other query for a slice-of-life narrative?

Hadn’t thought about it in those terms, had you, slice-o’-lifers? While you’re pondering the questions of original perspective and voice, let’s take another peek at our second example.

Some might say that this could never happen, but THINLY-DISGUISED AUTOBIOGRAPHY is based on a true story, with the names changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

Help yourself to a second gold star if you exclaimed, “Is there a particular reason that this querier feels the need to explain to our Millie what fictionalizing an account means? And how could it be remotely relevant to her decision to request manuscript pages that the writer changed the names?” At the querying stage, neither of these pieces of information will help a screener make a decision.

Do I sense some raised hands out there in the ether? “But Anne,” writers of autobiographical fiction everywhere cry, “in true-to-life fiction, the accuracy with which reality comes to life on the page has to be relevant! If I feel that my laser eye for exposing life’s seamy underbelly constitutes one of my book’s strengths, why shouldn’t I mention it in my query?”

An excellent question from the writer’s point of view, but less so from Millie’s. Plenty of perfectly wonderful fiction has exactly the quality you describe — including, I suspect, works by some of your favorite authors. That tends to be how literary fiction writers become drawn to writing literary fiction, right?

But isn’t your skill in this respect something best demonstrated by your manuscript, rather than through simply asserting it? As we have discussed before, screeners prefer to be shown writing quality — and are suspicious of being told about it. Why? Well, a Millicent toiling away at any established agency will see dozens of queries per day in which aspiring writers claim that their books are the best-written tomes since Madame de Sta?l first put pen to paper. In any given instance, that may well be true, but on the whole, the fine folks in agencies prefer to make up their own minds about that sort of thing.

Or, to put it as Millie would, don’t review your own book; you’re not the most credible reviewer. And if she’s not going to be impressed by self-review, why include it? Queries are, according to most writers compelled to compose them, maddeningly short on available page space, after all.

How might a savvy querier use that space instead? How about through a vividly-drawn description of the book’s premise? Or an intriguing introduction of its protagonist and central conflict?

Ripped from the headlines, JUMPING ON THE BANDWAGON is a fictionalized account of a story that dominated the media for a month. Based upon accurate facts, this novel speculates upon what really happened.

Again, I hope some of the conceptual problems leapt out at you — and if so, grab another gold star from petty cash. Since our eager querier mentions that the book is a novel, isn’t it redundant to explain that it’s fictionalized, or that there’s speculation involved? Aren’t facts by definition accurate? While we’re nit-picking, even if ripped from the headlines were not a clich? (but it is), if the story in question honestly did dominate the aforementioned headlines for so long, wouldn’t Millicent recognize it without the prompt?

Something else might well occur to a screener: if a story lingered in the headlines long enough ago for the querier to have written a novel about it, does its memory linger in the national consciousness enough to engender a reaction in the target reader? If that’s the case today, will it still provoke recognition a couple of years hence, when the book might realistically hit the shelves?

Think about it: assuming that Millicent asks for the manuscript today, the querier sends it tomorrow, and the novel rushes through the agency’s approval process with unusual haste, signing with the agent is going to take some time. So will the agent’s selling the book to the right editor. Even ruling out time to make any changes to the manuscript either the agent or acquiring editor might request, publishing houses’ print queues are often a year or two long.

So I ask again, headline-rippers: will the fact that your novel is based upon a well-known real-life incident from last year be the book’s strongest selling point in, say, 2016?

I’m not saying that it won’t, of course. But more often than not, first-time novelists’ expectations of how rapidly a book based upon current events are gleaned from how quickly nonfiction books reach the reading public — and nonfiction books by journalists to boot. Again, though, think about it: nonfiction books are sold on proposals, not full manuscripts, so a writer already an expert on the topic (like, say, our friend John happened to be about oil drilling) can leap on a news event, crank out a sample chapter and marketing material, and have the proposal in an agent or editor’s hands within a matter of weeks. A publisher already geared for the fast-paced current events market could reasonable expect a writer used to writing on tight deadlines to churn out the proposed manuscript within a matter of just a few months, and voil? ! The book appears on shelves while the headlines are still within recent memory. With e-books, the turn-around time would be even shorter.

Fiction simply does not move that fast through the production process, typically. Think years, not months.

That’s a realistic timeline for most personal memoir, too, by the way. Celebrity memoir frequently pops onto the shelves more rapidly, for the exceedingly simple reason that publishers are savvy enough to know that celebrity can be a fleeting thing. A intensely-described personal memoir written by a good writer who happens not to be famous yet, however, will not necessarily hit the shelves any faster than a fictional account of the same events.

And yes, I did put it that way on purpose. As an editor and writing teacher, I meet memoirists all the time who tell me that they were drawn to memoir because they would have to write less of the book before they could begin approaching agents. They have a story to tell, darn it, and want it in readers’ hands as soon as possible.

In real life, though, it does not always work out that way. I would urge you to consider, then: what else about writing your story as memoir appeals to you, other than the fact that you are writing about actual events? What about that type of narrative’s tightly-focused worldview will draw the reader into your story better than a fictional treatment?

I’m not trying to dissuade you; figuring out the answers to those questions will make it quite a bit easier to construct an engaging book proposal. Not to mention helping you sidestep one of the more common querying missteps for memoir:

This is a true memoir, depicting events as I lived them.

If you did not fall off your chair, moaning, “But all memoirs are true! And all memoirs deal with the life their authors lived,” well, I can only advise you to scroll up to the top of this post and reread it more carefully. True memoir, real-life memoir, and memoir based upon a true story are all notorious Millicent-irritants, because they are redundant phrases. Why waste precious page space telling her what she already knows?

Besides, if every memoir is both true and about its writer’s life, how could asserting either self-evident attribute help convince Millicent that your book is different and/or better than any other memoir she sees queried? Wouldn’t it make more sense to show her in a beautifully-written book description?

All of which brings me back to the burning question I posed earlier: why do so many writers of the real describe their books as though being based on actual events were not only their single most central attribute, but far and away their most vital selling point? My guess would be that for the writer, the truth of the story is its most important trait.

And that, my friends, is perfectly natural: from the writer’s perspective, nailing the truth of a scene could not possibly be more important, right? As I said, it’s awfully hard to write well about the real in a manner that will convey precisely what the writer sees, feels, touches, and otherwise experiences to the reader. It requires an intensity of reliving that few non-writers can even imagine — and a depth of personal honesty that few other endeavors in life require.

But if you don’t mind my saying so, what renders a piece of writing important, vital, or even good to the writer will not necessarily be what grabs a reader about it. Nowhere is that more true than in writing about the real. The truth, as they say, is not always simple.

I’m not suggesting any hard-and-fast solutions here; I’m merely bringing up some questions. Please give them some thought, reality-wranglers. Trust me, the better you know why you have chosen to tell your true story in a particular way, the easier time you will have discussing your manuscript with your future agent and editor.

And please let me know how these challenges have cropped up in your writing. I’m always interested in the real-life experiences of actual writers, after all. Keep up the good work!

This time of year, the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver sees it all the time: a reason to move otherwise good girls and boys from the Nice to the Naughty list. Yet often, as both he and our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, know only too well, the difference between a properly-punctuated sentence and one that is, well, not, lies in a simple slip of the writer’s finger — or lack of one. Take a gander at the type of hastily-scrawled note that often greets our St. Nick.

Hello Santa. Thanks for any presents you might see fit to leave old boy. Wow do I ever appreciate it.

– Janie

No wonder the otherwise jolly elf weeps at the sight: clearly, the Punctuation Vacuum has beaten him to this household. Either that, or Janie has really, really lazy fingers. The note he had expected to see nestled next to a plate of cookies would have read like this:

Hello, Santa. Thanks for any presents you might see fit to leave, old boy. Wow, do I ever appreciate it.

– Janie

Let me guess: to many, if not most of you, these two notes are essentially identical: the words are the same, right, so the meaning must be? That’s an understandable interpretation, given how often we all now see direct address and exclamation commas omitted all the time. Indeed, some modes of electronic expression, such as news program bottom-of-the-screen crawls and Twitter, seem actively to discourage proper punctuation.

But that doesn’t make it right. Santa’s a stickler for rules.

As it happens, so are Millicent and those of us who edit for a living. Punctuation matters to us — and, frankly, folks in publishing tend to laugh when aspiring writers express the astonishingly pervasive opinion that it doesn’t.

Why the ho, ho, ho? Well, leaving aside the perfectly reasonable proposition that one of the basic requirements of a professional writer is the consistent production of clearly expressed, grammatically correct prose, in some cases, improper punctuation can alter a sentence’s meaning.

And that, boys and girls, can only harm self-expression. Take, for instance, the two faux pas in the title of this post.

Thanks for the cookies Millicent.

What’s that I hear on the roof, reindeer?

Most readers would assume, as those of you who didn’t notice that commas had been purloined from Janie’s original note probably did, that what she actually meant to say was this:

Thanks for the cookies, Millicent.

What’s that I hear on the roof? Reindeer?

That’s not what the first versions actually said, though, was it? Basically, Janie operated on a presumption evidently shared by an amazingly high percentage of queriers, literary contest entrants, and manuscript submitters: that it’s the reader’s job to figure out what the author probably meant, not the writer’s job to express it so clearly that there would be no question.

In practice, most of us are perfectly willing to translate casual communications into more comprehensible prose, at least mentally. People often tap out or scrawl notes in a hurry, or, since the advent of mobile electronic devices, under less-than-ideal conditions. It’s relatively safe, then, to presume that your third-best friend will understand if that text message you sent while hanging upside down from the monkey bars omitted a comma or two.

Writing intended for publication is expected to adhere to a higher standard, however: even an editor wowed by the sentiments expressed in that last set of examples would not seriously consider publishing them without revision. Although the rise of on-screen editing has increased the number of punctuation, spelling, and grammar errors that slip through editorial fingers and onto the printed page — nit-picks are significantly harder to catch on a backlit screen than in hard copy — no one who reads for a living would believe for a second that clarity and proper punctuation don’t matter. A manuscript that seems to imply that the writer believes they are unimportant not only is unlikely to impress a pro — to an experienced agent or editor, it simply screams that this is a writer who will require extra time, effort, and, yes, proofreading.

Why might that harm your submission’s chances? Think about it: if the agent of your dreams already has 127 clients, who is his Millicent more likely to regard as a viable candidate for #128, the writer who expects her to guess whether What’s that I hear on the roof, reindeer? means what it literally says, or the writer whose prose is so clear that she’s not left in any doubt?

Remember, too, that your garden-variety agency screener or contest judge has very little of a writer’s prose upon which to judge talent and facility with language. How on earth could Millicent possibly know for certain whether the speaker of that first sentence was simply sliding back up the chimney while he was writing, and thus was too busy to devote the necessary thought to the beauty and rigors of proper punctuation, or simply was not aware of the relevant rules? She’s not allowed to base her reading upon what she guesses a writer meant, after all; she can only evaluate what’s actually on the page.

All of which is a nice way of saying: don’t expect her to cut you any slack. A writer familiar with the rules of punctuation and conscientious about applying them is simply less time-consuming for an agent to represent than one who believes that the fine points of how a sentence looks on the page doesn’t really matter. Someone at the manuscript’s future publishing house will take care of the copyediting, right?

Well, no. Not if Millicent or her boss, the agent of your dreams, stops reading after the second missing direct address comma on page 1.

Yes, really. Since this particular rule is pretty straightforward, it’s fairly common for screeners and contest judges to regard non-adherence — or, equally pervasive in submissions, uneven adherence — as an indicator of, if not necessarily poor grammar in the manuscript as a whole, then at least an authorial lack of attention to detail. Any guesses as to why detail-orientation would be a desirable trait in an agency’s client?

Slap a great, big gold star on your tree if you leapt to your feet, shouting, “By gum, a detail-oriented writer could be trusted to produce clean manuscripts!” You’re quite right, shouters: since few agencies employ in-house editors (although some agents do like to edit their clients’ pages), signing a writer who had already demonstrated that he regards the world as his proofreader would inevitably be a more time-consuming choice than snapping up one that could be relied upon to spell- and grammar-check his own manuscripts. On a revise-and-resubmit deadline too short for anyone at the agency to proof pages, that could be the difference between selling a book to a publisher and rejection.

Comma placement is starting to seem a trifle more relevant to your life, isn’t it? Fortunately, the rules governing direct address and exclamations are quite easy.

Hey, wake up. Were you aware that you were snoring, Janie?

There — that wasn’t so difficult, was it? Hey is an exclamation, so it is separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma. And because that second sentence was directly addressed to Janie, a comma appears between the rest of the sentence and her name.

Armed with those valuable precepts, let’s revisit the punctuation choices that made the Furtive Non-Denominational Gift-Giver choke on his milk and cookies — or cognac and truffles, as he always insisted on being left for him in the Mini household throughout my childhood. (My parents said that he deserved the upgrade for shinnying down our unusually small flue.) How do they look to you now?

Hello Santa.

Thanks for any presents you might see fit to leave old boy.

Wow do I ever appreciate it.

Thanks for the cookies Millicent.

What’s that I hear on the roof, reindeer?

Now that you’re looking for those commas, the paucity of them — and, I hope, the extra one in that last sentence — is distracting, is it not? Let’s talk about why. Sentences 1 and 4 are aimed at Santa and Millicent, respectively, right? The names are a tip-off that each requires a direct address comma.

Hello, Santa.

Thanks for the cookies, Millicent.

Sentence #2 is a bit trickier, since what Janie is calling the reader (old boy) is not a proper noun. If we don’t apply the direct address rule here, though, the most logical interpretation is actually this:

Thanks for any presents you might see fit to leave for the old boy.

Yet Janie’s household does not contain any old boy, or indeed any boys at all — and if Santa knows when they are sleeping and knows when they are awake, he must logically be aware of where said boys are sleeping, must he not? He might be forgiven, then, for finding this sentence perplexing. Fortunately, all it would take is a single stroke of the pen to render Janie’s intended meaning crystal clear.

Thanks for any presents you might see fit to leave, old boy.

No question that the reader — Santa, presumably, if Janie’s been a good girl this year — is the old boy being addressed, right? Now that we’ve cleared up that cosmic mystery, what should we note-proofers do with this?

Wow do I ever appreciate it.

Wow is an exclamation — and we have a rule for that, do we not? Let’s try applying it. While we’re at it, why not allow Janie’s punctuation to reflect the intensity of her gratitude?

Wow, do I ever appreciate it!

If you’re ever in doubt about whether an expression is sufficiently exclamatory to require separation from the rest of the sentence, here’s a nifty test: vehement exclamations can stand alone. As in:

Wow! Do I ever appreciate it!

Oh, my! What a beautifully-wrapped present!

Heavens! What an enormous cake! You shouldn’t have gone to all of that trouble, Madge!

What a difference a punctuation choice can make to a sentence’s meaning, eh? (See what I just did there? Eh is an exclamation, albeit not a particularly intense one.) A detail-oriented punctuator could become even more creative, depending upon context. Let’s have some fun.

Wow — do I ever appreciate it? I would have thought my reaction to your having given me a rabid wolverine last Christmas and the Christmas before would have told you that.

Oh, my, what a beautifully-wrapped present…if you happen to believe that bacon is an appropriate wrapping medium for a desk lamp.

Heavens, what an enormous cake. You shouldn’t have gone to all of that trouble, Madge: as much as we all enjoyed seeing your immediate family leap out of that enormous pie at Thanksgiving, that’s really the kind of surprise entrance that works only once, don’t you think?

Speaking of how punctuation can alter meaning, our remaining example presents some difficulties, doesn’t it? Let’s take another peek at it.

What’s that I hear on the roof, reindeer?

At first glance, this may appear to be a proper use of direct address: the narrator was simply speaking to a reindeer that happened to be lingering nearby. In today’s incredibly rich fantasy novel market, it’s not at all difficult to imagine a context in which that comma use would make sense.

“What’s that I hear on the roof, reindeer?” Janie shouted. “Your ears are better than mine.”

Blitzen shook his antlers in annoyance. “Ceilings are opaque, you know. I can only fly; I don’t have X-ray vision.”

However, being an intimate friend of the writer’s — we could hardly be closer — I know that the original sentence was tucked within a thriller. I ask you: does a direct address interpretation make sense here?

“What’s that I hear on the roof, reindeer?” Janie whispered.

The Easter Bunny did not bother to stop stuffing presents into his basket. “Oh, stop jumping at every sound. Santa’s not due for an hour.”

“I still say that we should have hidden in a closet,” the Tooth Fairy hissed, “and waited until after ol’ Kris dropped off the swag.”

“And let Fat Boy snag all the cookies?” The rabbit snapped off a small branch from the tree to use as a toothpick. “I’m in it for the sugar, baby.”

“Then we should have gone to the Minis,” the fairy grumbled. “They have truffles.”

Blitzen’s hoof poked into the small of Janie’s back. “Move, sister, and you’ll find yourself with a face full of tinsel.”

Since the reindeer doesn’t enter the scene until five paragraphs after Janie’s speech, it seems unlikely that she’s addressing him. What the writer intended to convey by that comma was not direct address, but something closer to my original suggestion:

“What’s that I hear on the roof?” Janie whispered. “Reindeer?”

In fairness, though, you can see why even a meticulous self-proofreader might not have caught this one. If Janie had speculated that the sounds were caused by an inanimate object, that comma might have passed muster.

“What’s that I hear on the roof, falling shingles?” Janie whispered.

Unless this is a book about a madwoman or a psychic whose ability to cajole roofing substances into telling her Santa’s whereabouts, direct address doesn’t make sense here, does it? Even a skimmer is unlikely to fall into that interpretive trap. Several alternate constructions would obviate the possibility entirely, though. The first option should look slightly familiar.

“What’s that I hear on the roof?” Janie whispered. “Falling shingles?”

“What’s that I hear on the roof — falling shingles?” Janie whispered.

Am I sensing some growing excitement about the possibilities? “Hey, Anne,” some of you exclaim, beautifully demonstrating your grasp of how a comma should offset an exclamation, “something has just occurred to me, you sneaky person.” (Direct address!) “Since the natural habitat of both direct address and exclamations is conversation, wouldn’t it make sense to zero in on dialogue while proofreading for these particular faux pas? If I were in a hurry, I mean, and didn’t have time to read my submission or contest entry IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD?”

Not a bad timesaving strategy, exclaimers — they do tend to congregate in text written in the second person. (Hey, I’m talking to you, buddy!) You might be surprised, though, at how often direct address and exclamations show up in first-person narratives, or even chattier-voiced third-person narratives. For instance:

Oh, God, I was afraid she would say that. My brain spun wildly, searching for an answer that would not make me look like the schmuck I actually was. By Jove, I was in a pickle.

Before anyone suggests otherwise, may I hastily add that the rookie strategy of attempting to make first-person narration sound more like common speech (as opposed to what it’s intended to represent, thought) by eliminating necessary punctuation and grammar has become awfully hard to pull off in a submission, at least for adult fiction or memoir. You wouldn’t believe how often Millicent sees text like our last example submitted like this:

Oh God I was afraid she would say that. My brain spun wildly searching for an answer that would not make me look like the schmuck I actually was. By Jove I was in a pickle.

Or even — sacre bleu! — like this:

OhmyGodIwasafraidshewouldsaythat. My brain spun wildly searching for an answer that would not make me look like the schmuck I actually was. By Jove I was in a pickle.

Yes, yes, we all understand that both versions could arguably be regarded as conveying breathlessness. So could this:

Oh, God, I was afraid she would say that. I felt every last oxygen molecule being sucked out of my lungs.

While style choices vary, naturally, from book category to book category — there honestly is no adequate substitute for reading recent releases of books similar to yours, particularly those written by first-time authors, to gain a sense of what is considered stylish these days — generally speaking, relating what’s going on via actual words tends to be considered better writing than offbeat presentation choices. All the more so if those words show what’s going on, as we saw in that last version, instead of telling it — or requiring Millicent to perform a dramatic reading of the text in order to grasp the fully intended meaning.

Oh, you thought that OhmyGodIwasafraidshewouldsaythat didn’t convey an expectation that the reader would try saying it out loud? Isn’t the sound of this sentence spoken as a single word the point here?

Style is not the only reason that you might want to give careful thought to whether non-standard presentation choices would be more effective than other means of narration, however. While they may seem like a shortcut, they can actually mean more work for you. Not only must any such punctuation and grammar voice choices be implemented with absolute consistency throughout an entire first-person narrative– quite a bit harder than it sounds, if one happens to know the rules or wants to be able to use Word’s grammar-checking function — but honestly, it’s really only clever the first few times a reader sees it done.

Trust me, any experienced Millicent or contest judge will have seen this tactic crop up too often to find it original at this late date in literary history. And how could either of them tell on page 1 whether the omissions were the result of a manuscript-wide authorial choice or the writer’s not being conversant with proper comma use? Heck, are they even sure that the writer of that last version even knows where the comma key is located?

Judgmental? You bet. If Millicent, a literary contest judge, and Santa’s job descriptions have anything in common, it’s that they are tasked with separating those who make an effort to follow their respective spheres’ recognized standards of niceness from those who do not. Rejection is the literary world’s lump of coal, available year-round.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, unlike so much of the manuscript submission process, proper comma use lies entirely within the writer’s control. Personally, I find that rather empowering — unlike style judgment calls, which must necessarily rely in part upon Millicent’s personal reading tastes, punctuation is governed by rules. And rules can be learned.

Does that huge thunk of jaws hitting the floor reverberating throughout the ether indicate that some of you had been thinking about acceptance vs. rejection purely in terms of writing style? If so, you’re hardly alone: why do you think so many submissions and even queries turn up on Millicent’s desk apparently unproofread? Or spell-checked? Obviously, there are a heck of a lot of aspiring writers out there who think punctuation, spelling, and grammar just don’t matter — or that it’s an agent’s job to see past rule violations to story and talent.

Had I mentioned that to the pros, these things matter very much? Or that in publishing circles, providing error-free manuscript pages containing only sentences whose meanings are clear on a first reading is considered the minimum requirement of professional writing, not an optional extra?

Frankly, every writer who has taken the time to learn her craft should be rejoicing at this. Imagine how hard would it be to get on Santa’s Nice list if you had no idea what he considered nice.

While I’ve got you pondering the hard questions, here’s another: is resting your book’s future on a manuscript draft that does not consistently apply the rules you already know people in publishing expect to see respected really any less of a stab in the dark? Wouldn’t it be a better long-term strategy, as well as a better use of your scant writing time, to invest in making sure that the factors you can control are tweaked in a manner more likely to land you on Millicent’s Nice Job list?

Ah, that suggestion got under some skins, didn’t it? “But Anne!” bellow those who find thinking about rules a barrier to the creative process — and you are legion. “I understand that it’s the writer’s job to make a story come to life on the page, not the reader’s job to decipher convoluted text, but to be absolutely truthful, I don’t feel completely comfortable wielding all of the various rules of grammar and punctuation. I had kinda hoped that once I landed an agent and sold a book, the kind folks who handle books for a living would walk me through all of that.”

I’m glad you brought this up, wobbly rule-appliers — this is one of the greatest divides between how the publishing world thinks of what constitutes a well-written manuscript and how most aspiring writers tend to envision it. To a pro, the technical side of writing is not separable from the overall writing quality; to a new writer, though, punctuation, grammar, spelling, and even clarity are primarily sentence-level issues, easily fixed down the line.

No wonder, then, that it comes as such a shock to most first-time queriers and submitters to learn that the overwhelming majority of manuscripts get rejected on page 1. While the pros see a book’s opening as a representative writing sample, writers regard it as a minuscule fraction of a larger work, each page of which is entitled to its own assessment.

“What do you mean, a couple of punctuation, spelling, or clarity problems on page 1 could have triggered rejection?” they wail, and who could blame them? “Shouldn’t a book be judged by — wait for it — the writing in the whole thing?”

Perhaps, in principle, but very, very few readers wait until the end to come to conclusions about a book, even outside the publishing industry. A Millicent at a well-established agency will read literally thousands of submissions every year. If she read each in its entirety, she would have time to make it through only hundreds.

Believe it or not, this way actually provides a writer with a fresh idea and original voice with a better shot of impressing her. It means fewer book concepts are weeded out at the querying stage than would be necessary if agencies routinely assigned Millicents to read every single syllable of every single submission.

And, lest we forget, to a professional reader, a hallmark of a fabulous new literary voice is its consistency. The Great American Novel should read as lyrically on page 1 as on page 147, right? And shouldn’t it all sound like the same author’s voice?

See why I always encourage writers to read their manuscripts IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD before submitting them? All too often, aspiring writers new to the game will start sending out their work practically the moment after they type THE END on a first draft, without double-checking that the voice, style, and — as an editor, I must ethically add this — story are 100% consistent throughout the manuscript. It’s completely normal, however, for a first-time novelist’s voice and sense of the story to develop throughout the writing process; going through, figuring out what you like best about your own writing, and revising the whole so it sounds like that (to use the technical term) before you submit can increase your story’s chance of winning friends at an agency by leaps and bounds.

Or, to put it another way, are you the same writer you were the first day you sat down to work on your book? Aren’t you better at conveying your intended meaning now? And, if you take a long, hard look at your objection to Millie’s rejecting manuscripts on page 1, isn’t part of your chagrin that she might not read long enough to get to your best writing?

Heavy thoughts for a holiday, perhaps, but the Literature Fairy’s annual gift to those of us who work with writers is an awareness of just how many of you lovely people spend the last few weeks of December kicking yourselves for not having landed an agent or gotten published in the previous year. If the past is prologue, a phenomenally high percentage of you will translate those feelings into a New Year’s resolution to be a more active aspiring writer next year — to send out a barrage of queries, for instance, or to come up with a really solid list of agents to query. Perhaps you’re going to finish that manuscript, or get the one an agent requested eight months ago out the door. Or maybe, finally, you are going to rearrange your schedule so you can write a specified number of hours per week, rather than the more popular method of trying to squeeze it in whenever you can find the time.

All of these are laudable goals — don’t get me wrong. I would like to suggest, though, that while you are shuffling through the resolution possibilities, you consider adding one more: promising yourself that this will be the year that you spend January sitting down and reading your manuscript from beginning to end, in hard copy, as a reader would, to gain a sense of what is best about your own writing.

Because, really, wouldn’t you have an easier time presenting your work professionally if you didn’t just know that it’s good, but also why? And wouldn’t you be happier if Millicent judged your page 1 if it actually did represent a consistent voice and style throughout the book?

Just a thought. While you’re reading, of course, you could always humor me by keeping an eye out for omitted commas.

Hey, nobody ever said that making it onto Millicent’s Nice Job list was going to be easy. Who did you think she was, Santa?

Enjoy the holiday, everybody; try not to run afoul of any reindeer. I hear that you wouldn’t want to run into Blitzen in a dark alley. Keep up the good work!

An old friend presented me with a stumper yesterday, campers: although neither a teacher nor a writer himself, Nate had just been asked to teach a writing class at work. Specifically, he had been allotted six hours in which to transform the prose stylings of the fine folks in another department from argumentatively sound but hard to follow into…well, the company’s owner had not been all that clear about what better writing would mean in that context, but he certainly was adamant that he wanted it.

Oh, and would the day after tomorrow be too soon to offer the class? Under the circumstances, I would have called me in a panic, too.

Already, I see the logical conclusion-huggers out there scratching their heads. “But Anne,” the rational point out, as they are wont to do, “if this storyline popped up in a novel, readers would find it implausible. In the first place, if the owner doesn’t know what good writing is, how can he set writing standards for the department? If he does not know how his staff is falling short of those standards, how is the class — which, if my calculations are correct, should convene sometime tomorrow morning — to address the problems? And if the boss is so darned worried about his employees’ writing, wouldn’t it make more sense to bring in someone with experience diagnosing writing problems and helping writers iron them out?”

There you go, expecting the real world to be as plausible as fiction. I’ve said it before, and I shall no doubt say it again: reality is a lousy writer.

Case in point: Nate’s predicament is exceptional not in that he’s fallen victim to the astonishingly pervasive notion that anyone who can express himself well on paper must perforce be capable of teaching others how to do it — which, as anyone who has attended an authors’ panel on craft issues at a writers’ conference could tell you, does not always bear out in practice — but insofar as he happened to have gone to elementary school with an editor willing to help him come up with a last-minute lesson plan. Makeshift workplace writing seminars seem to have been on the rise in recent years; I hear constantly from aspiring writers who insist that their queries must be in business format (left-justified, non-indented paragraphs, a skipped line between paragraphs) because, they claim, “the guy who taught my writing class at work said standards have changed.”

Upon further inquiry, that guy virtually never turns out to have received the Nobel Prize in literature, if you catch my drift.

To be fair, though, Since my primary experience of Nate’s forays into the realm of the Muse has been a paragraph or two in his annual Christmas card, I’m not really in a position to assess his writing — and since neither of us work in the department he’s assigned to teach, I had to ask to peruse his potential students’ writing specimens before I could even begin to give him advice. Every profession has its own internal standards for communicative excellence, after all; for all I know, Nate might be the Edith Wharton of interoffice memoranda.

As a writing teacher, however, I did know that his terrified, broad-based question, “How do I teach these people to improve their writing?” was not one easily answered under any circumstances. Those of us who edit for a living hear this one fairly often, doubtless due to the widespread and erroneous belief in one-size-fits-all writing solutions — and universally-applicable writing advice, for that matter.

Which is why, one presumes, that the standard editorial answer is, “It depends. What kind of writing are you talking about?”

Did that resounding thunk of chins collectively hitting floors indicate that at least a few of you were unaware that what constitutes good writing varies not only by style and voice, but by context and intended audience as well? To those of us that read for a living, there’s no such thing as generic good writing, especially when one is discussing books. While clarity and voice consistency are desirable in any genre, specific standards vary by book category: what would be laudable in YA, after all, might bore a literary fiction readership to death, and vice versa. The conventions by which paranormals operate quite happily would seem absurd in a Western. And call me zany, but when I pick up a cookbook, I don’t expect it to read like a Sherman Alexie short story. (His new short story collection is terrific, by the way, even though it contains some old stories.)

So while a layperson might have responded to “How do I teach these people to improve their writing?” with a handful of soothing platitudes about the importance of showing vs. telling or some light wrist-slapping on the subject of run-on sentences, Nate could hardly have asked a pro like me more challenging question, or one more likely to produce a three-hour answer. Since neither he nor his prospective students seemed to be looking to break into the literary market, however, I spared him the nuanced lecture on the many gradations of stylistic merit, contenting myself instead with asking what kind of writing these fine folks habitually did and what about their efforts had disturbed his employer enough to be willing to stop the enterprise dead in its tracks for a day in order to improve it.

The questions seemed to surprise him, or so I surmise from a pause long enough for me to have set down the phone, have my hair permed, and returned without missing his response. “Well,” he said eventually, “they’re expected to describe real-world situations.”

Was it callous of me to laugh? “That, I’m afraid, is the challenge faced by every memoirist and other nonfiction writer who has ever trod the earth’s crust — and a hefty percentage of the novelists as well.”

“Yes,” he replied, “but my folks are not very good at it.”

As I love you people, I shall not reproduce the eighteen minutes of cross-examination required to elicit what might charitably be regarded as a reasonable description of what kind of writing these excellent people were not doing well, for whose eyes it was intended, and how their literary efforts were not pleasing that target audience. To my ear, the problem seemed not to be entirely writing-related: the budding Hemingways in question were routinely expected to walk into conflict-ridden situations, rapidly assess the various potential and/or current combatants’ needs, desires, and aggressive capabilities, and produce a terse summary in the few minutes they had at their disposal before diving into the next fracas.

I’m inclined to believe that even the actual Hemingway would have found that a writing challenge, especially on a short deadline. And the more Nate talked, the more the tight deadlines seemed to be exacerbating the writing problems. In a move that might not astonish anyone familiar with either rushed writing or professional jargon — but evidently did come as something of a surprise to Nate’s employer — those harried scribblers had fallen into the habit of using stock phrases to save time. If not actually using the copy and paste functions to recycle entire sentences.

Obviously, that practice would over time try the patience of anyone tasked with reading many of these reports back-to-back, but not only for reasons of style. Specific descriptions would not be particularly conducive to reuse, right? In order to be easily portable, the less descriptive those statements could be, the better.

Better for the rushed copy-and-paster, that is, not for descriptive clarity — or, importantly for the credibility of the reports Nate’s students are expected to write, the reader’s ability to picture what’s going on. Even if one of these writers is a terrific observer and an obsessively honest reporter of fact, repetitive wordsmithing will convey a less-then-meticulous impression.

Let’s examine why. If Report #1 reads like this:

Arnold, Beatrice, and Celeste work in adjacent cubicles in an office on the fifth floor, and they do not get along, because everyone has different opinions about the best way to get work done. Words are routinely exchanged when conflict arises. On October 2, fearing for their lives, coworkers called the police.

And Report #2 reads like this:

David, Evelina, Franz, and Gerard work in adjacent cubicles in a ground-floor office, and they do not get along, because some of them feel that the division of work is not fair. Words are routinely exchanged when conflict arises. On October 2, their boss got sick of it and called us in.

It’s pretty hard for the reader to tell these two battling groups apart, apart, isn’t it? That’s the nature of generic description: even if the writer’s has something specific in mind, stock phrasing represents generalities — and that’s what the reader is going to take away.

Lest those of you who write fiction be congratulating yourselves, thinking that this is one writing problem, thank goodness, that does not apply to your work, let me hasten to add that the same principle applies to any description. No matter how detailed the writer’s mental image of a person, place, thing, or situation might be, if the narrative uses generalizations to depict it, or holds back salient details, the reader’s going to end up with only a vague impression of the writer’s artistic vision.

Take, for example, the photograph at the top of this post. It would be factually accurate, as well as quite speedy, to describe it as a picture of a piece of wood. A writer in less of a hurry could tell a reader that the wood is dry, has a knot in it, and that a small portion of it had apparently been slightly burned at some point in the dim past.

All of that would be true; you can see that for yourself. But if you had never seen the photograph in question, would reading either of those descriptions enable you to picture it? Couldn’t those descriptions apply to a practically infinite variety of photos of pieces of wood?

If we cranked our observational skills up to high, however, and set our literary skills on stun, we could easily describe that image so thoroughly that the reader would not only be able to envision it, but would know precisely how that particular hunk of wood differed from every other piece of wood on the planet. If the reader ever encountered it in real life, she would recognize it. (“That’s it, officer — that’s the lumber I read about!“)

If the description on the page does not show the relevant specifics, though, how is the reader supposed to learn about them? Guesswork? Telepathy? Showing up on the author’s doorstep and demanding a fuller description?

Obviously, at least from a professional reader’s perspective, it’s not the reader’s job to do any of these things; it’s the writer’s job to provide those specifics. How a savvy writer would chose to go about that, though, might well depend upon the type of narrative that would contain the description, as well as the writer’s individual stylistic preferences and the needs of the scene. In a thriller, for instance, a just-the-facts description might be appropriate:

The glass in the window rattled in the wind. Not too surprising, really, considering the state of the wood holding it together: dry, cracked, and full of knots. Even its garish yellow paint job seemed to have given up on holding itself together.

In an emotional YA scene, however, this treatment might make more sense:

I ran my fingertips along the warped wood of the window frame, wondering if I could pry it open. Old yellow paint flaked onto my sleeve as I worked a pencil into the largest crack in the wood. The last inmate must have been too depressed to try to escape — all she seemed to have done was crush out a cigarette on the yielding wood.

For literary or mainstream fiction, though, it could read like this:

No wonder the window leaked heat like a warped sieve — the very wood holding it together had dried out to the point of shattering. An ancient knot spun near the confluence of sill and frame, sending angry concentric circles of resistance shivering toward the glass. Deep, murky cracks wrinkled decades-old yellow paint.

Quite a difference from the window frame was made of wood and painted yellow, eh? While all of these descriptions are factually true, the reader would take away radically varying mental images.

Bearing that in mind, let’s take another gander at our two original examples. Now that we know that the reader’s sense of what’s going on could be substantially improved by including more specifics, what other style changes would be helpful here?

Arnold, Beatrice, and Celeste work in adjacent cubicles in an office on the fifth floor, and they do not get along, because everyone has different opinions about the best way to get work done. Words are routinely exchanged when conflict arises. On October 2, fearing for their lives, coworkers called the police.

David, Evelina, Franz, and Gerard work in adjacent cubicles in a ground-floor office, and they do not get along, because some of them feel that the division of work is not fair. Words are routinely exchanged when conflict arises. On October 2, their boss got sick of it and called us in.

Did the word and phrase repetition catch your eye this time around? It would have maddened Millicent the agency screener, and for good reason. Even taking Report #1 and Report #2 individually, their repetitive phrasing is, let’s face it, not very interesting to read — and thus inherently less memorable, from the reader’s point of view, than more varied word choice.

Did that last contention make you do a double-take? Okay, here’s a test of whether it’s true: quick, without scrolling back up, explain the differences between what the writer observed in Situation #1 and Situation #2.

Did you come up with anything but a floor level, and perhaps a couple of the participants’ names? Neither would a reader. That’s a writing problem as much as a matter of content choice.

How so? Well, by definition, repeated phrases do not add new information to a description in the way that fresh wording can. Yet many writers deliberately repeat words and phrases, apparently in the mistaken belief that the reader will magically derive a more complex meaning from seeing the same writing a second, third, or fourth time than s/he did the first time around. Take a gander:

The sight made Zenobia sad, sad in a way that no sight had made her feel before. And that realization made her sad, too, because she realized that unless she could manage to change the course of history, she might well be the last human ever to see the sight at all.

Okay, okay, I get it: the lady’s sad, and she’s seeing something. But no matter how many times the narrative tells me Zenobia’s sad, I’m not going to understand her sadness better than I did the first time it used the word. And surely it’s not unreasonable for me as a reader to wonder what the heck she’s seeing — or to resent that the narrative keeps referring to a sight that it’s not showing me.

Seem like an extreme example? Perhaps this frequency of word repetition is on the high end, but you’d be amazed at how often manuscript submissions simply adapt few chosen words and phrases to many descriptive purposes. Verbs are particularly prone to this treatment.

The door was locked. That was unexpected, like the frustration downtown had been. He tried to break it down, but the door was too strong for him. Frustration made him grind his teeth.

He was down to his last idea. If he couldn’t get inside, or at least prove that he had tried, all of his plans would be down the drain. He would be broke. It was just like that time in Phoenix, when Ariadne had treated him like a dog.

If you don’t mind my asking, what does was convey to the reader the fourth time it appears that it didn’t in the first three iterations? Or, to stand the question on its head — a lot more interesting than any of the activity indicated by the verb choices here, I must say — what does this passage gain in either stylistic or in storytelling terms by recycling these words and phrases?

Come up with anything? I didn’t, either. But you’re starting to feel more sympathy for the conflict-describers’ supervisors, are you not, if not for Millicent, for having to read this kind of prose all the time?

I sense some furtive shifting in chairs out there. “But Anne,” those of you fond of word repetition protest, and well you should, “isn’t word choice a matter of style? Maybe the writer here reused things deliberately. The phrasing above might not be your cup of tea, or Millicent’s, but it is stylistically distinct. In fact, read out loud, it might even sound pretty cool.”

That, as you say, is a matter of opinion, but even if Millicent or I did think it sounded cool (and I don’t), the limited vocabulary and repetitive phrasing here carry distinct clarity costs. What, may I ask, happened downtown? Why was it frustrating, and what about it produced the same type of frustration as the current situation? For that matter, how is this situation like what occurred in Phoenix? While we’re asking, who is this trollop Ariadne, and in what way did her interactions with our hero resemble the manner in which she might hobnob with man’s best friend?

See the problem? Even if the manuscript prior to this point had simply throbbed with detail about that donnybrook downtown, conveyed a sterling sense of our hero’s door-battering capabilities, and devoted 70 pages to Ariadne’s emotionally questionable proclivities, the word choices here deprive the reader of a clear sense of what’s going on in this particular moment. Not all feelings of frustration are identical, so why present them as though they were? How does our hero attempt to breach the door, and how precisely did it resist him?

And don’t even get me started on how the inclusion of hackneyed phrases — down the drain, treated him like a dog — further obfuscate meaning. Yes, most of us will understand in general what these stock phrases mean, but it honestly isn’t the reader’s job to guess how these clich?d descriptions apply to this particular situation, is it?

Hadn’t thought of those phrases that way, had you? Most writers new to the game wouldn’t: if a phrase is in common use, they reason, it just sounds right. How else would someone put it?

That’s a dangerous question to tempt Millicent to consider, I’m afraid. “Well,” she is likely to snap, “a writer might want to phrase it in a more original fashion, just for the sake of style. While this one is at it, s/he might consider applying some thought to coming up with less expected ways to convey break it down and grind his teeth, too.”

You have a point there, Millie, and one that applies equally well to the workplace writing of our first examples and manuscripts intended for submission to agents and editors. Naturally, it’s important that writing sounds good to the writer, but that is not the only measure of whether a passage is well-written. It needs to sound good to the reader — and not just any reader, either. It must sound good to the reader in the writer’s chosen audience, the kind of reader who already reads books like the one the writer has produced.

Why? Because that’s the reader who will ultimately buy that writer’s work when it appears in print.

Millicent wants to help good writers reach that reader. So does her boss, the agent of your dreams, and the editor to whom he pitches manuscripts. Since agencies and publishing houses specialize in marketing to particular types of readers — thus book categories, right? — it’s a safe bet that all of these professional readers will be familiar with the kind of prose that’s currently selling well to your target audience.

That means, in practice, that they’re not just looking for generic good writing. They’re looking for what that audience will consider good writing.

Which, of course, will vary by book category. And if that doesn’t make you want to stop scrolling through this post, snatch up your hat, and race to the nearest well-stocked bookstore to check what kind of prose readers of books like yours are buying these days, well, you might want to reexamine your priorities.

I sense some purists gearing up to be huffy, do I not? “I’m appalled, Anne,” those who pride themselves on eschewing mere mercenary motives scold. “I thought we were talking about good writing here, not altering our artistic vision to conform to whatever bestseller happens to be dominating the literary market at the moment. I don’t want to sound identical the authors whose work happens to be selling well in my book category; my work is original.”

I applaud that — and it’s precisely my point. By definition, stock phrases, clich?s, and expected phrasing do not read on the page as the original phrasing of an exciting new voice; they’re generic. At submission time, that means that using them can never help a writer impress Millicent stylistically.

They’re a waste of page space, frankly. As your friend in the biz and sincere well-wisher, I would rather see you devote that space to what’s best about your writing: your individual vision, expressed as only you can describe it on the page, in a manner likely to appeal to your target readership.

No amount of one-size-fits-all writing advice is going to be able to tell you how to do that — and, frankly, that’s probably good news if you’re trying to develop your individual authorial voice. Generic style precepts that purport to be universally applicable presuppose a single notion of good writing. But you have too much respect for your intended reader than to buy into that oversimplified notion, don’t you?

Don’t squander your unique artistic vision by expressing it in vague terms or overused phrases. Trust me, your reader will want to gain a clearer sense of what you have in mind. Keep up the good work!

As those of you who have been hanging out here at Author! Author! any length of time have probably surmised, there are few eventualities I enjoy more than when a deeply talented, hard-working writer gets a first book published — unless it’s when a magnificently gifted, ardently committed established author has a new book out. And if, as in the case of today’s guest blogger, it’s also a writer who has not only paid her dues in not one, not two, but three different book categories, but also takes the time to help aspiring writers learn the craft ropes, well, you’ll pardon me if I become downright giddy.

Why, you ask, hesitant to join me in cavorting around the nearest bonfire? Having grown up watching many, many authors that later became household names claw their way to public recognition, word by word and reading by reading, I must confess that I get a kick out of seeing good writers succeed. I also believe quite firmly that those of us that celebrate not only our own literary milestones, but those of our fellow writers, have an easier time keeping the faith over the course of that uphill climb.

And not merely because the road up the mountainside is notoriously windy and steep: it’s hardly a news flash that in the literary world, your garden-variety overnight sensation has often put in a decade or two of intensive toil before attaining public recognition. By cheering on our compatriots, we can reaffirm our sense that a difficult path is not an impossible one: good writing does indeed get published. We can also learn from those who have tread the byways before us how to navigate it — and, if the author in question is generous enough to share her experience and expertise, perhaps pick up a few tips to improve our writing as well.

That’s why I asked the perpetually wonderful Bharti Kirchner, author of five critically-acclaimed novels, four cookbooks, and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, to share her insights into writing today. She’s well worth attending to: in addition to being one heck of a conference speaker on craft (something surprisingly few writers’ conferences have been concentrating upon lately), Bharti is one of the Pacific Northwest’s great food writers, both in nonfiction and in fiction. Her Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries is one of my favorite food-related novels of all time; I would urge anyone seriously interested in learning how to handle comestibles on the page — not nearly so easy as it looks — to study it carefully.

Why? Well, Bharti’s a well-established master of sensual detail. Her characters do not experience food merely as a fleeting sensation dancing upon their taste buds: her narratives speak to the eyes, the ears, the skin, the nose, the psyche. Her characters experience life down to their viscera. Pastries is also a wonderfully evocative and accurate portrait of Seattle life, for those of you looking to learn something about establishing a sense of place.

Just of author — and writing — I like to celebrate here at Author! Author! in short. And to help all of you get in the habit of rejoicing that such authors have put in all of that hard work, I’m going to pop a metaphorical champagne cork over her new novel, Tulip Season: A Mitra Basu Mystery, by offering all of you something that could help move you along that uphill climb: the opportunity to generate some Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy.

That’s right, campers: it’s time for this year’s Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence. This time around, we’re going to be concentrating on writing through all of the senses in a competition I like to call the Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012. This year, we’re accepting novel, memoir, and narrative nonfiction book excerpts in a quest to find the best previously-unpublished sense-oriented writing that’s not in a sex scene. And this time, instead of asking for just a first page, the entries will consist of an entire scene of 8 pages or less.

Why, yes, that is a bit of room to flex your descriptive muscles, now that you mention it. To make it even more interesting, the judges and I have decided to create more separate categories for different kinds of writing.

That’s not all, either. Because some of you asked so nicely last year, I’m not just going to announce the contest’s rules and deadline and leave you to it. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be using this literary competition as a springboard for wrapping up our ongoing discussion of craft in contest entries.

Yes, really: we’re going to be using this contest not only to help build up the writing chops to bring the senses to life on the page, but to learn how to wield those skills to maximum effect in contest entries and manuscript submissions.

You’ll find the rules at the end of this post. Yes, yes, I know: I usually list them at the top, and I shall surely devote an entire post to them down the line, but I think that what Bharti has to say will be so helpful to your initial brainstorming about what you would like to enter in this contest — which is going to call upon all of your creativity — that I am going to introduce her and her insights first.

Because Bharti is so delightfully prolific, I can do that in several ways. First, as always, I can show you the publisher’s blurb for her latest book:

A missing domestic-violence counselor. A wealthy and callous husband. A dangerous romance.

Kareena Sinha, an Indian-American domestic-violence counselor, disappears from her Seattle home. Her best friend, Mitra Basu, a young landscape designer, resolves to find her. Mitra’s search lands her into a web of life-threatening intrigue where she can’t be sure of Kareena’s safety or her own.

And, while we’re at it, let’s take a gander at some deservedly high praise for it:

“Mitra is gunpowder chutney to the mystery genre, her adventures a hot refreshing blast of sumptuous storytelling. Bharti Kirchner has once again conquered another literary field. Highly addictive.”

“A multi-layered mystery, Tulip Season is carefully crafted. Set against the backdrop of spring and its promise of new growth, the heat is on as master gardener, Mitra Basu, pulls out all the stops searching for her missing friend, Kareena, a domestic violence counselor who herself may have been abused. A sense of menace is palpable as Mitra puts together all the pieces that lead her to a bittersweet but welcome epiphany. Lovely and compelling!”

I could also, to give you a sense of her range, bring up my favorite of her cookbooks, The Bold Vegetarian, of which Publishers Weekly said:

Only a stoical (or very full) cook would not be tempted by the recipes here, which kick off with Carmelized Garlic from Spain, Pecan Mushroom Pate from France and Indian-Style Roasted Potatoes redolent of asafetida, mustard oil, cumin and mango powder. While Kirchner (The Healthy Cuisine of India; Indian Inspired) draws heavily on that subcontinent for inspiration, she includes recipes from China, Spain, France, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, Korea, the Middle East and the U.S. She also melds recipes to come up with some truly appetizing new dishes, such as an Asian Pesto that combines the flavors of the Italian original with hints of the lime/peanut/garlic sauces of east Asian cooking. Kirchner is sparing in her use of fat, relying on cooking techniques, spices, flavored oils and judiciously combined textures to create good taste. Her gentle tours through international marketplaces, the extensive “vegetarian pantry” and the descriptions of recipes’ evolutions are likely to inspire readers’ inventiveness, although the more timid can rely on the generous helping of serving suggestions and listed substitutions.

And then I could, I suppose, answer the question that half of you have been shouting out there in the ether — how on earth does a writer move so easily between book categories? — by referring you to the excellentAuthornomics interview in which she talks about just these sorts of practicalities. Or, for those of you with a bit more time and a hankering to hear about craft, I could easily send you straight to a really interesting interview with Book Lust’s Nancy Pearl:

But I always feel that the best way to find out about a writer is by — wait for it — reading her writing, don’t you? So I’m going to let her speak for herself without further ado. I shall meet you on the other side with particulars about the writing contest.

Join me, then, in welcoming today’s guest blogger, one of the local greats. Take it away, Bharti!

Years ago at a Bouchercon conference (a conference meant for mystery readers) held in Seattle, I heard the following anecdote. A group of out-of-towners, who had come to Seattle specifically for this conference, got together in the evening and ventured out to try various local restaurants. Off they went hopping from one restaurant to another, places where their favorite sleuths had dined in the mystery novels they’d enjoyed.

The story moved me. I loved food and always wanted to write about it. At the time I was a novice writer, mostly doing magazine pieces, but immediately appreciated the power of food references, how much they affect the readers.

My passion for food continued to grow. With the passing of years, I went on to write four cookbooks and numerous magazine food articles. Possibly in a future post, I’ll talk about the phenomenon of writing nonfiction books/short pieces on the subject. In this post, I’d like to dwell on the use of food in fiction and creative nonfiction (such as a memoir).

Why is food so important in writing? When M.F.K. Fisher was asked why she wrote about food and not about love or war, she said, “Because I am hungry.” In my humble opinion, we hunger for a taste sensation in our mouths because we’re hungry to taste life.

Perhaps that is why cooking has always been a big part of my existence. Baking, in particular, fascinates me. I lose all sense of time as I mix the flour with baking powder, whisk the eggs, and add the almond extract. It gives me great pleasure to inhale the aroma of a tart baking in the oven. The pleasure doubles when I serve the finished product, warm and rosy, to family and friends.

I’d always dreamed about writing a book on baking. But there are far too many baking books in the marketplace. So I thought of a different way of giving expression to my baking urges. What if I made baking a pivotal element in a work of fiction?

In my fourth novel, Pastries, I found just such an opportunity. The setting was a neighborhood bakery in Seattle and many of the players were bakers. I had ample opportunity to infuse the pages with the aroma of melting chocolate and fresh vanilla beans. I had moody bakers who didn’t show up. I also had bakers who literally forgot the icing on the cake.

Pastries, incidentally, isn’t just about baking. In the plot, I’d worked in Sunya’s dilemmas: a broken romance, mother who’s about to marry a man she doesn’t like, and intense competition from a chain bakery named Cakes Plus. I had to be aware of one thing: not to overdo the food descriptions, not to overwhelm the readers’ palate with mentions of chocolate mousse and cinnamon buns. A little food description goes a long way.

To paraphrase a reviewer: This novel deals with such diverse elements as the WTO riots in Seattle, Zen in the workplace, and wasabi cheesecake.

What do you love about food and cooking? Can you put that in a novel or memoir?

Sometimes it’s not the actual dishes that the characters’ consume that move the story but rather the moods around the dinner table, the emotions that suddenly soar. Here is an example from my latest novel, Tulip Season. Mitra, a landscape artist, is intent on finding her best friend Kareena who is missing. She’s done all she could and has had the help of community members and friends, and there is no lead.

In this particular scene, Mitra and Ulrich sit at her kitchen table, sharing a dinner of cauliflower curry, candlelight between them. Mitra is fascinated by Ulrich, a mysterious man from Germany she’s recently met. For a moment she’s able to let go of her worries about her missing friend and concentrate on the plate before her. Ulrich says he loves her cooking and asks her if she grew the vegetable herself. She says yes.

More compliments follow. They’re bantering, having a lively conversation. He even mentions the words “honeymoon” and “couple.” She drinks it all in, losing herself in a daydream about them getting married, and even picturing the wedding ceremony in the nearby rose garden.

Then her eyes fall on the candlelight. A moment ago, it was shivering. Now it is dead.

Only by creating a cozy dinner scene first was I able to do this foreshadowing. Food can lead you to unexpected twists and turns.

Bharti is Contributing Editor for The Writer. She has written for Food & Wine, Vegetarian Times, Writer’s Digest, Fitness Plus, Northwest Travel, and The Seattle Times. Her essays have appeared in ten anthologies, the most recent being Imagination and Place: Weather.

Bharti has won a VCCA (Virginia Center for Creative Arts) Fellowship, a City Artist’s Project award, two Seattle Arts Commission literature grants, two Artist Trust literature grants, and has twice been a Fellow of Jack Straw Productions. She has been honored as a Living Pioneer Asian American Author. She is a popular speaker at writer’s conferences nationwide, and may be followed on Twitter: @bhartikirchner.

Anne again here — wasn’t that fun? Now let’s talk about this summer’s literary contest. First, Since we’re going to be concentrating upon craft issues this summer at Author! Author!, this season’s writing contest is going to focus squarely upon their importance to expressive excellence. We always like to reward good writing, but this year, we’re going to be expanding the variety of categories.

All entries must be writing for the adult market (don’t worry; there will be a YA contest later in the summer), but Memoir and Narrative Nonfiction will be separately judged, for instance, as well several different stripes of genre fiction. That way, we may reward a broader variety of writing. A certain minimum number of entries must be received in each category, however, for the prizes to be meaningful, so do tell your friends and critique group members!

We’re also making the writing challenge more difficult than in years past. The Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence have always rewarded entries featuring strong, sense-based detail and imagery, but this year, that will be the primary judging criterion. To that end, we’re calling only for scenes that utilize a range of senses in interesting and unexpected ways. But in order to keep things interesting (and the results PG-rated), entries must present a scene that does not involve overtly sexual contact.

So although this competition is for writing that incorporates all of the senses, we will not be accepting sex scenes, period. Nor will we accept an entry containing profanity. Not that there isn’t some great sensual writing dealing with that arena of human experience, as well as some magnificent swearing, but this is a blog committed to making it possible for writers of all ages and varieties of Internet access to participate.

Many library and home computers are protected by blocking programs, you see. And I would hate for any members of our community not to be able to view the winning entries in each category — which will be published here. (More on that later.)

Third, we’re opening up the possibilities for what you can enter. Yes, the contest is still calling for manuscript excerpts, so entrants will not have to take the time away from their works-in-progress to write something new, something folks seemed to feel pretty strongly about in years past. But this time, the entry need not come from the opening pages of the book; by popular demand, entrants will be allowed to submit a synopsis that shows the judges where the submitted scene falls in the manuscript.

Finally — and I suspect this will please many of you — you actually do have most of the summer to contemplate entering. Why? Well, in previous years, some members of our little community complained (nicely, of course) that they didn’t have enough lead time to pull together an entry.

So this time around, I’m giving you until the week before Labor Day. In fact, I’ll let you cut it so close that you will be able to smell your neighbors’ charcoal heating up for weekend burger-grilling: the deadline is midnight in your time zone on Tuesday, October 30, 2012Monday, December 3, 2012 — changed by popular demand!

So you have a nice stretch of time to polish up those scenes. Please read all of the rules carefully, and feel free to ask follow-up questions.

Seriously, please ask if anything at all proves puzzling. As I always do when I’m planning to work on a contest-entry series, I polled a discreet group of veteran contest judges about trends in entries, and wouldn’t you know it? Every single one of them expressed the wish that good writers would read contest rules more closely.

Why? Because it’s the single most common reason for not making it to the finalist round.

I just mention.

In the fine tradition of the Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence, then, and as part of my ongoing quest to provide good writers with much-needed ECQLC, I am proud to announce:

The Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012

Although the last time any of us here at Author! Author! checked, human beings experience the known world through their sensory organs, the overwhelming majority of manuscripts seem to rely mostly upon just two: sight and sound. That’s understandable, of course, since the world is stuffed to the gills with television, online, and movie storylines that must depend upon only those two senses to convey meaning. On the printed page, however, there’s seldom a reason for a narrative to limit itself to only what could be observed on a screen.

In order to encourage aspiring writers to incorporate more senses — and more specific sense-oriented detail — in their manuscripts, the Sensual Surfeit Literary Competition of 2012 is calling upon you to wow the judges with just how thoroughly you can make them feel that they are there for one scene in your book.

The catch: it cannot be a scene that contains overtly sexual activity. Find other ways to engage the senses. And the scene in question must be 8 pages or less.

Winners will not only receive fabulous prizes (hold your horses; we’re getting to those), but may have their scenes and accompanying synopses both published and critiqued in a post here at Author! Author! for all the world to see and admire. To be specific:

The grand prize winner in each category will receive a half-hour Mini Consult on a query, synopsis, and first 10 pages of the manuscript from which the winning scene was excerpted, as well as having the winning entry, bio, and an author photo posted on Author! Author!

First and second place winners will have their entries posted and critiqued on this blog.

Because winners will also be awarded life-long bragging rights and coveted ECQLC , the judges reserve the right to award as many (or as few) prizes as the quality and quantity of the entry pool in any given category warrants. Awards are purely up to the discretion of the judging panel.

Entrants may enter more than one category, but a particular scene may be submitted in only one category. Please select your category by the type of book from which the scene is taken, rather than the content of the scene itself. The categories are as follows:

All entries must be submitted via e-mail to contest(at)annemini(dot)com by Monday, December 3, 2012, at midnight in your time zone. Late entries will not be considered. Please submit each entry in a separate e-mail, in accordance with the rules below.

Those are the general rules. Here are the specific steps required to win. Do read them all carefully, as I am anticipating vigorous competition. Please be aware that entries that do not follow the rules will be disqualified.

1. Select a scene no more than eight pages in length from your manuscript or manuscript-in-progress that best demonstrates the use of sense-oriented description and/or imagery. Scenes may be excerpted from any point in the book, but do be aware that the judges will be assessing the writing by only this scene and your synopsis (see Step #5).

Pages must be in standard format for book manuscripts, in 12-point Times, Times New Roman, or Courier. Work that is not double-spaced, contains shrunken margins, or otherwise differs from standard format will be disqualified.

All entries must be in English. Whether you choose to write in American English, Canadian English, or U.K. English, however, is entirely up to you. Just make sure it’s spelled correctly.

2. Make sure that the scene in question does not include any overtly sexual act or profanity. The goal here is sensual description that is specifically non-sexual. Remember, too, that the judges will be looking for a variety of senses to be addressed in the scene.

3. Polish your scene to a high gloss and save it as a Word document, as a .doc file Only .doc entries in Word will be accepted — not TextEdit, PDF, or any other formats, please. Please title the Word file containing your synopsis as YOUR LAST NAME + SYNOPSIS. Please containing the scene with your name and the abbreviated title of your book (Austen Pride & Prejudice), not just as contest entry or the ever-popular Anne Mini contest (The last time I ran a contest like this, I received 42 entries with one of the other file name.)

4. In a separate Word document, give your name, address, e-mail address, and telephone number, as well as the category you are entering. On that same page, please include a 1-paragraph explanation of how the scene fits into the overall story of the book. This is the only chance you’re going to get to set up the scene for the judges, so make it count!

5. On the second page of the document described in #4, include a synopsis of no more than 1 page, giving the judges an overview of the book’s premise, its main characters, and its central conflict. Again, this synopsis must be in standard format. If you are unfamiliar with either standard format or how to write a 1-page synopsis, you will find explanations (along with examples) under the HOW TO FORMAT A BOOK MANUSCRIPT and HOW TO WRITE A 1-PAGE SYNOPSIS categories on the archive list located on the right-hand side of this page.

6. Make sure that both documents are properly formatted: precisely as they would appear in a manuscript submission. Please be aware that correct formatting is a prerequisite to entry in this contest, not merely a judging criterion. If it is not double-spaced, in 12-point type, and featuring a slug line (Author’s last name/book title/page #) in each page’s header, the judges will not consider the entry.

7. Attach both Word documents to an e-mail. Please include SSLC ENTRY and the category number in the subject line. Please also mention the category In the body of the e-mail. (It makes it easier to process the entries.) Again, the categories are:

Category I: Literary fiction, women’s fiction, and mainstream fiction

Category II: Science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal

Category III: All other genre fiction, including romance and mystery

Category IV: Humor

Category V: Memoir

Category VI: Narrative nonfiction, cookbooks, and academic books

Make sure to say who you are, too, so we don’t get entries mixed up. It’s also a nice touch to say something pleasant (like “Howdy, Anne!”) in the e-mail itself. I just mention.

8. Make sure to mention which category you are entering. Seriously, we need to know this.

9. E-mail the whole shebang to contest(at)annemini(dot)com by Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Monday, December 3, 2012, at midnight in your time zone. If you are entering more than one category, please submit each entry in a separate e-mail. Do I need to explain that the (at) should be rendered as @, or that (dot) should appear as a period? Nah, probably not; you all understand why reasonable people don’t post their e-mail addresses online

Those are the rules! Please follow them closely. Indeed, you may wish to bookmark this page, so you may revisit and review them prior to hitting SEND.

I have time for only a quick one today, I’m afraid, campers, but at least the reasons are entirely appropriate, symbolically speaking: I shan’t be talking too much about humor in contest entries today because — wait for it — I’m in the throes of solidifying the contest rules for this summer’s Author! Author! Awards for Expressive Excellence. I shall be unveiling the criteria this coming Friday, but here’s a hint: at least one of the categories will be integrally related to something we shall be discussing today.

Ready, set — speculate!

On to the day’s business. Last week, I tempted the contest gods by bringing up the seldom-discussed topic of humor in entries and submissions. Contrary to popular opinion, not everything — or, alas, everyone — that seems funny to the writer will necessarily strike a professional readers as equally so on the printed page.

Or, as I put it last time:

Jokes that need to be explained after the fact are seldom funny to the reader.

While amusing real-life incidents often translate well directly to the visually-oriented worlds of film and TV, they do not always work equally well on the pages of a book.

Verbal anecdotes generally feature too little detail or context to be funny when reproduced as is onto the printed page.

Stop glaring at me. It’s true: funny anecdotes do not always funny prose make. Nor do hilarious real-life incidents. Also, verbal anecdotes are seldom redolent with character development, if you catch my drift. Caricature works beautifully there, but on the page, motivation becomes far more important. Not to mention backdrop and context.

All of that goes double for what’s funny on Facebook, unfortunately: quite a lot of everyday humor is situational. Or dependent upon the audience’s already being familiar with the characters and/or premise. As is quite a lot of sitcom humor, actually, but in social contexts, one’s kith and kin tend to cut one slack. Consequently, the amusement bar tends to hover quite a bit lower than it does in situations — like, say, when you enter a writing contest or submit to an agency — in which the prevailing standard of whether a piece of writing is funny is based upon whether it impresses impartial readers who could not pick the author out of a police line-up.

Translation: “But it made my friend/significant other/bus driver laugh out loud!” is not a reliable indicator of whether Mehitabel the veteran contest judge or Millicent the agency screener will find something funny on the manuscript page.

And how to put this gently?…often seems to come as a great big surprise to writers new to the art of making readers laugh, particularly memoirists and novelists that borrow heavily from their quotidian lives. “If an anecdote is funny verbally,” they apparently reason, “it should be equally amusing if I just describe the situation exactly the same way in writing, right?”

Actually, no. Why doesn’t this tend to work? Well, tone, for one thing: a talented anecdotalist puts on a performance in order to give his tale poignancy and point.

Good comic authors are well aware of this — did you know that both Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde, renowned in their day as hilarious public readers, routinely used to read crowds versions of their writing substantially different from what those same readers might buy in a bookstore, or even hear in a theatre?

This was exceedingly smart, in case you were wondering. Funny on a printed page and funny in from a podium can be quite different animals. Also, it was brilliant marketing: people who had heard them read could boast about how much more amusing these authors were in person. Great way to sell tickets to one’s next lecture tour.

On the page, though, none of those stage tricks work. Mehitabel and Millicent will not be able to imagine you saying the words in your manuscript out loud, after all. Nor can they possibly see what you are picturing. All they can judge your comic vision by is what is actually on the page.

But most aspiring writers and contest entrants don’t think of that, do they? Or so agents and editors surmise from the fact that surprisingly few humorous passages in submissions seem to reflect a serious attempt to convey a comic tone. Why bother? The situation is inherently funny, right?

Not necessarily. If the narrative does not adequately convey what was humorous in that real-life incident, it’s going to fall flat on the page.

“But why?” you gasp, poised to sacrifice a goat to Thalia.

Because all too often, the writer assumes fleshing out the funny is not necessary: in that verbal anecdote that’s been slaying ‘em for years, the hearers already knew enough about the teller (and, often, the situation) to be able to fill in any narrative gaps.

That’s an extremely dangerous assumption in a contest entry or submission. Let’s face it, neither Mehitabel nor Millicent is much given to filling in the humorous blanks to the hefty percentage of jokes whose appeal is best described by the common expression well, I guess you had to be there.

But the reader — both the one that needs to fall in love with your work before it can get published and the one that you hope will want to buy it after it’s published — wasn’t there, by definition. And even if s/he was, it’s not the reader’s job to try to figure out why humor on the page is funny; it’s the writer’s job to set up the amusing bits so well that the joke does not need to be explained.

It just makes the reader — any reader — smile. Yet another reason that it’s a great idea to seek out impartial feedback: the success of the line that made your mother choke with mirth and fall out of her chair may well depend upon the reader’s knowing about something that’s not currently showing up on the page.

You can’t know for certain if the only people you’ve been showing your writing share your life, after all. Since the point of publishing a book is, presumably, to reach people who did not, say, give birth to you, sit in the cubicle next to yours, or trundle down an aisle with you whilst one or both of you were wearing white, it honestly doesn’t make sense to think of your kith and kin as your target readers.

But that’s precisely who aspiring writers usually do envision as readers, isn’t it? Or so the pros surmise from the exceedingly high percentage of first-time memoirists and autobiographical novelists that murmur early and often, “But what will they think of me after I publish this?”

I can set your mind at rest on that, actually: if you’re writing about real events, at least a few of the people that were there will think your book’s depiction is wildly inaccurate. Heck, even some people who previously knew about those events only through your verbal anecdotes may regard your written version as coming from out of left field. That’s the nature of memory, as well as individuality; since everyone experiences events differently, everyone remembers them differently.

That’s why we say you had to be there, right?

Forgetting that the human experience is subjective, and thus requires fleshing out on the page, is frequently an issue when writing the real, but it seems to trip writers up especially often when they are trying to convey real-life humor. It’s just so easy to presume that the reader can picture every aspect of a remembered event; the writer does, right? That presumption is often the reason that the anecdote that’s been sending coworkers rolling in the proverbial aisles, causing tears of glee to burst from relatives’ eye sockets, and prompting best friends to say at parties, “Oh, Antoinetta, please tell that one about the parrot and the fisherman!” for years tends actually to be less likely to elicit a chuckle from someone that reads for a living than fresher material.

Why? Because in scenes written entirely from imagination, the writer knows for certain that he cannot rely upon the reader’s outside knowledge. The narrative is less inclined to rely upon elements that you had to be there to know.

Thalia is a demanding mistress, you see: she has a great affection for specifics. In ancient Greek, ?????? translates roughly as abundant festivity or blooming. So I like to think of comedy writing as being about expansion — of a funny premise, an amusing situation, or an oddball character.

Where I think most contest entries — and manuscripts — go wrong is in a tendency to contract a funny scenes, rather than expanding them. Due, perhaps, to that tired old truism about brevity’s being the soul of wit. Like all sweeping generalizations, this is not always true.

There’s plenty of hilarious lengthy humor out there, after all. Anyone that tells you otherwise is either a great lover of writing aphorisms, unfamiliar with the breadth of witty writing in the English language, or just plain too impatient to read anything longer than the back of a cereal box.

So there.

That being said, allow me to add hastily that when I suggest expanding funny scenes, I’m not talking about pacing — as anybody who has watched a TV comedy that doesn’t quite work can tell you, funny that drags can rapidly become tedious. But that shouldn’t mean rushing through the comic elements — or cutting away from a hilarious moment and back to stern narrative the nanosecond after a good quip.

You don’t want that funny line to look like a fluke to Mehitabel and Millicent, do you?

Physical comedy often gets rushed on the page, unfortunately, sometimes so much so that it’s hard for the reader to follow what’s going on. That’s particularly likely to happen in a narrative containing a lot of run-on sentences, I’ve noticed: I guess that writers fond of them just like flinging events onto the page as quickly as humanly possible.

But as Gandhi said, there’s more to life than increasing its speed. To which I would add: there’s more to writing comedy than a rapid telling.

I sense some aphorism-huggers shaking their heads. You want proof that a too-speedy telling can flatten the funny. Fair enough. Here’s a slapstick moment, conveyed with the breathless pacing and overstuffed sentences Mehitabel and Millicent see so much.

Harriet grabbed her usual wobbly table at the coffee house, shoving her laptop, backpack, an extra-grande (whatever that meant) mocha, a dog-eared novel, and her lunch onto the too-small surface because she was in too much of a rush to get online and answer the e-mail that Bertrand must have sent her by now. Of course, he hadn’t, but she quickly became engrossed in reading the fifteen other e-mails cluttering up her inbox because it was Monday, when everyone came dragging into the office, then remembered an hour later the million things that they hadn’t done last week and rushed to blame their procrastination on somebody else, which she hated. When a handsome stranger brushed by to claim his latte from the counter next to her, he knocked over her drink. She jumped up to try to yank her possessions out of the way, but she was too late, everything was soaked. She only managed to save her laptop, backing up so hard that she shoved her chair into the lady sitting behind her, causing a domino effect of café patrons slamming into each other. And now it was time to get back to work, and she hadn’t eaten even a bite of her lunch.

Awfully darned hasty, isn’t it? There are some funny elements here, but they get a bit lost in the welter of frenetic activity. And cramming all of it into a single paragraph doesn’t really do the scene any favors, either, does it?

So we can’t really blame Mehitabel for wanting to shout, “Whoa! Slow down and show us what’s happening!”

Glad to oblige. Here’s that scene again, shown at a more reasonable pace.

The lunchtime crowd of caffeine-seekers had, as usual, avoided the three-legged table. Harriet always brought her own shim to shove under the short leg. By the time she had coaxed the tabletop into something close to horizontality, Alex had shouted twice that her extra-grande (whatever that meant) mocha must be getting cold.

As usual, the cup seared her hand. She carried it with her fingertips until she could balance it atop the tenuous pyramid she had constructed: laptop atop a dog-eared paperback novel supported by her backpack, with her bagged lunch teetering on the last few inches of table. Food could wait until she powered up her computer and answered the e-mail that Bertrand must have sent her by now.

Of course, he hadn’t. What a jerk. Irritably, she gnawed on a mushy apple, scrolling through pointless e-mails from her coworkers. Typical Monday: everyone came dragging into the office, then remembered an hour later the million things that they hadn’t done last week and rushed to blame their procrastination on somebody else.

“George!” Alex screamed. “Do you want your latte or not?”

Suitably chastened, a handsome hipster lunged toward the counter. Sympathetic to his embarrassment, Harriet pretended to be engrossed in what was in fact the single most boring e-mail ever constructed by human hand. The hipster’s mailbag swung through her peripheral vision, and abruptly, she was covered with coffee.

Automatically, she yanked her computer away from the spreading lake soaking her possessions. Leaping to her feet, she sent her chair sliding backward into the cramped couple at the next table. They scrambled to save their drinks, but their sandwiches flew onto the floor. The woman reached to retrieve the plates, unfortunately at the same moment that a good Samaritan at a neighboring table dove for them as well. Their heads smacked together with a sickening thud.

She wished she had time to enjoy his mauling. She had to get back to work, and she hadn’t eaten even a bite of her lunch. Typical Monday.

Much clearer what actually happened now, isn’t it? Do I hear a cheer for showing, not telling?

I sense some disgruntlement in the peanut gallery. “But Anne,” brevity-lovers moan, “that’s a lot longer! The contest I’m entering has a short page limit — if I expand my scenes like this, I won’t be able to enter as much of my manuscript as I had planned! And what if Millicent’s boss asked me for the first 50 pages of my manuscript. I want to get as much of the story under her nose as possible!”

Ah, these are both common concerns. Would it astonish you hear that they simply wouldn’t make any sense to Mehitabel or Millicent?

Why? Well, Millicent’s is perfectly aware that if submission request specifies a page limit, there’s going to be more manuscript beyond what the writer has sent. So will Mehitabel, if she’s judging a book category that calls for the opening pages and synopsis. That means, in practice, that a writer would be better off making those opening pages sing than trying to cram as much plot into them as possible.

If you’re genuinely concerned about length, there’s another option here, but I hesitate to suggest it: if the story overall is not humorous and it would take too much page space to render a comic bit unquestionably funny, consider taking it out altogether. Humor is a great way to establish your narrative voice as unique, but as I mentioned earlier in this series, it can be a risky contest entry strategy. Ditto with submissions. Funny that fails tends to be disproportionately punished.

Why, you ask? Comic elements in an otherwise serious manuscript can come across as, well, flukes. They don’t fit comfortably into the overall narrative; the individual laugh lines may be genuinely funny, but if there aren’t chuckle moments and fleeting smirk instants throughout as well, the funny bit can sometimes jar the reader out of the story.

I know: it’s kind of counter-intuitive. But true.

You might also consider cutting comic bits that you’re not positive will work on strangers. Unless you are lucky or brave enough to be a stand-up comic, a teacher, a prison guard, or have another job that allows you to test material on a live audience unlikely to run screaming from the room, you honestly cannot tell for sure if the bits that seemed hilarious to you in the privacy of your studio would be funny to anyone else.

In case I’m being too subtle here: it’s a bad idea for your first test of whether a joke or comic situation works to be submitting it to a contest, any more than it should be when you submit it to the agency of your dreams. The stakes are just too high, and it’s just too easy to imagine theoretical readers laughing at the funny parts.

Not that I’d know anything about that, writing a blog.

“But Anne,” some of you complain, and who could blame you? “I love my comic bits, but the contest deadline is imminent. I don’t have time to track down impartial first readers. Is there a faster method to test-drive my funny parts?”

Until you’re sure that your narrative voice is consistently diverting, it can be very helpful to read it out loud to somebody. See where the chuckles come, if ever. If an expected chuckle does not come, flag the passage and rework it, pronto. (I’ve been known to ask, when a line elicits only a fleeting smile, which of the following three possibilities is funniest.)

Reading out loud is also one of the few ways to weed out the phenomenon I mentioned last time, what movie people call bad laughs, the unintentional blunders that make readers guffaw AT a book, not with it.

Fair warning: any given listener will be able to respond spontaneously only once to a particular scene. So after you have reworked the problematic parts, you’re going to need to track down another victim listener.

Thalia is nudging me to point out that living with a comedy writer is no picnic. Yes, ma’am.

This strategy only works, of course, if you are philosophically open to the possibility that the sentence that you thought was the best one-liner penned in North America since Robert Benchley died is simply not funny, and thus should be cut. Admittedly, this kind of perspective is not always easy to maintain: it requires you to be humble. Your favorite line may very well go; it’s no accident that the oft-quoted editing advice, “Kill your darlings,” came from the great wit Dorothy Parker.

Yes, that’s right: she was talking about laugh lines. That’s not how your high school English teacher introduced you to the aphorism, was it? God, I hate sweeping generalizations about writing; they’re so often applied indiscriminately.

It is pretty good advice about comedy, though. Be ruthless: if it isn’t funny on paper, it should go — yes, no matter how much it makes you laugh. Or your best friend, or your spouse, or everyone around the water cooler at work. (Do offices even have water coolers anymore?)

As any good comedy writer can tell you, in the long run, actually doesn’t matter if the author laughs herself silly over any given joke: the reaction that matters is the audience’s. And no, the fact that your spouse/mother/best friend laughed heartily does not necessarily mean a line is genuinely funny. It may mean merely that these people love you and want you to be happy.

A little hard to resent that kind of devotion, isn’t it?

Lacking an audience, it is still possible to work your way into Thalia’s good graces by editing out the only marginally comical in your manuscript. As a contest judge and editor, I can tell you with certainty that aspiring comedians’ less successful efforts seem to rush to array themselves into easily-identifiable groups.

Next time, I’ll give you a guided tour of ‘em, so you may recognize them if — Thalia forefend! — they should rear their less-than-funny heads in your contest entries. In the meantime, polish up those laugh lines, burnish those chuckle-inducing moments, and keep up the good work!

Okay, I’ll admit it: the first part of that title is a tad cumbersome. I got tired of typing COUNTDOWN TO A CONTEST, PART {fill in Roman numeral here}. The contest deadline to which I was counting down has passed (how do people feel their entry process went, by the way?), and besides, much of what I’m discussing in this part of the series would apply — stop me if you have heard this before — equally well to refining contest entries and submissions to agencies.

I know, I know. Some day, I’m going to have to come up with more descriptive titles for my posts.

Let’s get back to courting the comic muse. Or, more accurately, to our discussion of how aspiring writers often think they are courting her, without actually winning her favor. Or so we must surmise, from the fact that such a high proportion of attempted humor leaves both Mehitabel, everybody’s favorite fictional veteran contest judge, and her niece Millicent, intrepid screener of manuscripts at a theoretical agency, with distinctly untickled funny bones. Further evidence might be gleaned from the startling frequency with which entries and submissions elicit spontaneous, uninhibited laughter with lines the writer did not think would pass anywhere near those aforementioned funny bones.

Ooh, nicely executed spit take, everybody. “Wha–?” would-be humorists across the English-speaking world cry, their eyes bugging out of their heads like cartoon characters (oh, you thought you were the first writer to use that simile?). “How can something intended to be unfunny provoke that response? I can understand a joke’s falling flat, but I hate the idea that Mehitabel and/or Millicent might be chuckling over my Great American Tragedy.”

Good question, eye-buggers. But didn’t the previous question answer it?

If the previous paragraph did not make you giggle, well, you are either delightfully innocent (and thus might want to avert your eyes from the next paragraph, in order to remain so), not a very detail-oriented reader (as Mehitabel and Millicent invariably are), or, perish the thought, the joke I just made was not very funny. Given the exceptionally high probability that all three are true, allow me to compound the mistake of having cracked not particularly wise by explaining why it should have been funny, as well as illustrative of my ongoing point. To render the narrative error even more representative of what M & M tend to see on the page, allow me to explain my failed joke as pedantically as possible.

You see, the would-be humorists asked how a piece of writing could provoke laughter if its author did think it was funny. I then said it was a good question — something I’m pointing out because I don’t have sufficient faith in the reader to believe s/he can remember what s/he has just read — but then turned that compliment on its head by addressing the imaginary questioners with a double entendre. That, for those of you new to the term, is when the comic value of a phrase arises from its meaning one thing literally, but also being subject to a sexualized interpretation. In this instance, eye-buggers could refer to those whose eyes protrude unusually far between their lashes, but it also — and herein lies the yuck factor — could imply that those same imaginary questioners are in the habit of performing a physically improbable sex act upon eyeballs in general. Get it? Get it? Compounding the humor: the sentence that followed raised the possibility that the phrasing in the previous sentence might have been unintentional — and thus likely to spark unintended laughter at the entry or submission stage. Har de har har har!

Hands up, those of you who thought my bad joke was funnier before I explained it. Keep those hands up if you found yourself wishing by a couple of lines into the subsequent explanation that I’d just accept that the joke hadn’t worked and move on.

Welcome to Mehitabel and Millicent’s world. They’re constantly treated to unfunny, marginally funny, and might-have-been-funny-after-a-couple-of-rewrites humor attempts. They are also, for their sins, frequently forced to read painful attempts to render an unamusing quip funny in retrospect. Over-explanation is one popular means — and, as we have just seen, it seldom works. Equally common:

Or having a character laugh in order to alert the reader that what’s just appeared on the page was intended to be humorous:

As the head bagger stomped away, Herman pictured a large brown bag descending upon him, scooping him up. Now trapped at the bottom, Ambrose would be helpless as a giant hand flung boxes of cereal and canned goods upon him, perhaps topped by a carton of eggs. He laughed at the mental image.

This, I am sorry to tell you, would cause Mehitabel to roll her bloodshot eyes. “Thanks prompting me to laugh,” she snorts, “because I couldn’t possibly have told that you meant this to be funny otherwise. I see you have also helpfully let me in on the secret that pictured referred to a mental image. Otherwise, I might have thought that the narrative had suddenly shifted from gritty slice-of-life fiction into magical realism.”

Let that be a lesson, would-be humorists: if a bit isn’t funny on the page, having a character find it amusing won’t make it more so. Also, as Mehitabel has just so kindly demonstrated for us, since readers cannot hear tone, sarcasm often does not come across well on the page. From which we may derive a subsidiary lesson: just because something generates a laugh when you say it out loud does not mean it will necessarily be similarly guffaw-inducing on the page.

Why did I put that in bold, you ask? Millicent and Mehitabel requested it; they’re tired of reading manuscripts out loud to try to figure out what on earth Herman thought was so darned funny.

Then, too, professional readers as a group tend not to like being told how to react to writing, period. Mehitabel has every right to feel irritated at being told that she should find what she has just read humorous. Self-review tends not to play well on the page, even if it is very subtle.

Oh, you don’t think what Herman’s creator did was self-review? M & M would regard it that way. They would also see the following fruitless authorial effort as reaction-solicitation. Any guesses why?

“The bookstore is closed for the night,” Gemma snapped, gesturing to the CLOSED sign on the door. “What are you two still doing here?”

“Oh, we’re just browsing,” Angelina said airily.

Bonnie laughed. “Yeah, we’re looking for a first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit.”

Gemma looked puzzled. “Why would you need to be wearing ski masks for that?”

If you leapt to your feet, crying, “Bonnie’s laughter is intended to order Mehitabel to laugh, too,” you deserve a gold start for the day. It doesn’t render Angelina’s joke any funnier, does it? Since M & M do not, as a rule, enjoy being told how to evaluate the writing in front of them, they would have been more likely to find the quip amusing if it had appeared like so. While we’re at it, let’s excise those other professional reader-irkers, concept redundancy and having a character vaguely point to something in order to let the reader know it’s there.

Gemma fixed the closer one with her flashlight. “The bookstore is closed for the night. What are you two still doing here?”

“Oh, we’re just browsing,” Angelina said airily, smiling through her ski mask.

Bonnie aimed her rifle just to the right of Gemma’s head. “Yeah, we’re looking for a first edition of Martin Chuzzlewit.”

“Oh, why didn’t you say so right away?” Gemma felt under the cash register for her favorite throwing knife. “We’re always happy to move some Dickens.”

Better, isn’t it? It’s funnier because the narrative trusts the reader’s intelligence more. As opposed to, say, the ubiquitous practice of just telling the reader point-blank that something is funny:

Barbara flung her banana peel on the ground. Her snarky coworker did not see it, trod upon it, and slipped. It was hilarious.

In case I’m being too subtle here: very, very few contest entries are genuinely funny. Oh, many of them try to be, and some attempts at amusing actually would be chuckle-worthy if spoken out loud, but humor is a capricious mistress. In order to work on the page, how a writer chooses to frame the funny is every bit as important as the joke itself.

Yes, really. You may have written the best one-liner since Richard Pryor accidentally set himself on fire, but if it’s not set up correctly, it’s going to fall flat. And that, my friends, is going to come as a huge disappointment to a humor-loving Mehitabel or Millicent.

Why, you ask? A funny entry, or even a funny joke in an otherwise serious entry, feels like a gift to your garden-variety professional reader. A deliberately-provoked laugh from a judge can result in the reward of many presentation points, and often additional points in the voice category as well.

Notice that I specified a deliberately-provoked laugh. An unintentional laugh, what moviemakers call a bad laugh because it springs forth from the audience when the filmmakers do not want it to occur, will cost a contest entry points. And it should: a bad laugh can knock the reader right out of the scene.

We’ve all burst into bad laughter at movies, right? My personal favorite cropped up in the most recent remake of LITTLE WOMEN. It’s quite a good trick, too: provoking a bad laugh in a scene that’s not only arguably one of the best-known in children’s literature, as well as one in which the filmmakers remained very faithful to the original text, can’t have been easy.

I’m about to show you the moment in question, but first, let’s take a gander at how Louisa May Alcott presented it to her readers. The March girls have just learned that their father, a chaplain in a Civil War regiment, is dangerously ill. Their mother, not unnaturally, wishes to travel across many states to nurse him back to health, but the trip will be very expensive. Everybody’s favorite little woman, Jo the tomboy, is frantic to help. After having disappeared for most of the day, she returns home with a wad of cash, and her family, equally unnaturally, wants to know whence it came.

…she came walking in with a very queer expression of countenance, for there was a mixture of fun and fear, satisfaction and regret, in it, which puzzled the family as much as did the roll of bills she laid before her mother, saying, with a choke in her voice, “That’s my contribution toward making father comfortable and bringing him home!”

“My dear, where did you get it? Twenty-five dollars! Jo, I hope you haven’t done anything rash?”

“No, it’s mine honestly; I didn’t beg, borrow, or steal it. I earned it, and I don’t think you’ll blame me, for I only sold what was my own.”

As she spoke, Jo took off her bonnet, and a general outcry arose, for all her abundant hair was cut short.

“Your hair! Your beautiful hair!” “Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty.” “My dear girl, there was no need of this.” “She doesn’t look like my Jo any more, but I love her dearly for it!”

As everyone exclaimed, and Beth hugged the cropped head tenderly, Jo assumed an indifferent air, which did not deceive anyone a particle, and said, rumpling up the brown bush, and trying to look as if she liked it, “It doesn’t affect the fate of the nation, so don’t wail, Beth.”

Now, Mehitabel and Millicent might well quibble over whether expression of countenance is redundant (technically, it is) or the unidentified speakers, or the unfortunate choice to demonstrate simultaneous speech by tossing aside the one speaker per dialogue paragraph rule. I also cherish the hope that you are all shaking your heads over Aunt Louisa’s regrettable affection for run-on sentences.

But there’s nothing to provoke a bad laugh here, right? It’s a sweet, evocative YA moment: the teenage heroine can’t stand to feel helpless, so she chooses to make a personal sacrifice in order to help her family. That’s a good plot twist. And if Amy (we assume) telling her that she’s now ugly hurt her feelings — “Your one beauty!” is a remarkably nasty thing to say, but she has a point: Jo’s effectively rendered herself unmarriageable for the next year or two — that’s good relationship development. And if she cries about it later that night, that’s good character development.

Here’s that moment again, as it appeared in the film. Note how the focus of the scene has shifted, doubtless as a reflection of the fact that cutting one’s hair was not nearly as shocking to moviegoers in 1994 as it would have been to readers in 1868. My apologies about the commercial at the beginning; it was the only version I could find.

See the problem? As in most filmed versions of LITTLE WOMEN, the young lady playing Jo — here, the inestimable Winona Ryder — is physically the most attractive of the bunch. Not to fault her portrayal of Jo, but Ms. Ryder arguably possessed at that point in her career the kind of face that artists over the centuries have willingly mortgaged their souls in order to depict with anything that approached tolerable accuracy.

So, predictably enough, at “Your one beauty!” the theatre positively rocked with mirth — and so much so that the next few exchanges were completely inaudible. Thus what was one of the dramatic high points of the book was transformed into an occasion for bad laughter.

And yet, amazingly, the script chose to feature that particular bad laugh TWICE: once as live action, and once as a voice-over flashback. When I saw the film, the second time engendered widespread chuckling, as moviegoers had their own little flashbacks about how completely ridiculous that particular moment had been. Good times were had by all.

Just once, I would like to see a version of LITTLE WOMEN where the casting reflected the book. Jo March was plain (in the novel, Meg was the pretty one); her hair actually was her only point of physical beauty. Her sacrifice in cutting it off in order to sell it, therefore, was significantly greater than if she had been otherwise gorgeous. It also, in my opinion, made it substantially easier to identify with her. Jo’s not a fantasy: she’s a real girl, with real problems.

Which were not merely a reflection of Louisa May Alcott’s real problems, incidentally, as readers (and reviewers) have historically assumed. It’s a surprising misconception, given that she wrote about her own wartime experiences so extensively: Louisa was the one that went off to war, not her father; she served a nurse in a Union hospital.

Oh, and those fantastic stories all of the filmed versions of LITTLE WOMEN (and, to a lesser extent, the text) lead us to believe the author considered bad, harmful writing? Alcott apparently actually preferred them to her children’s writing. She wrote many pretty good romantic thrillers — and, like Jo, she supported her family with them. She even sent her sister May (the prototype for Amy) to art school with the proceeds.

Why, yes, that is a digression, now that you mention it. I just get so sick of the automatic presumption that anything a woman writes must necessarily be autobiographical. In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s later life, people apparently asked her all the time who she knew that had managed to bring a corpse back to life. Because it’s not as though a woman who had lost all but one of her children before the age of 5 could have imagined FRANKENSTEIN, right? It’s not as though she were the daughter of two famous novelists or anything.

But I digress. We were talking about comedy, not tragedy.

The question of how real life translates to the page is not irrelevant to humor, however. It can be genuinely difficult for a writer to tell what does and does not come across as funny on his own printed page, especially if the scene in question bears some relation to the author’s life. So if you write comedy, or even want to ascertain that a single quip in a manuscript you are planning to submit is funny, it’s a serious strategic mistake to have Mehitabel or Millicent be the first human being besides yourself to read it.

I heard that gasp — the Jo March fantasy of writing in secret, then triumphantly announcing to incredulous kith and kin that one is published, is almost as common as semi-autobiographical first novels. (With apologies to Madame Shelley.) But if you are trying to be funny, good feedback — especially the kind of impartial feedback you might get from someone who does not happen to love you — is crucial.

Why especially? Well, what is funny in real life is often not amusing on the page, at least not to someone who was not privy to the actual event. There’s a reason, after all, that “You had to be there, I guess,” is so commonly uttered by anecdotalists the world over: real-life funny often arises from mishaps, actions out of character, or events whose comic juxtapositions would be entirely lost upon a bystander who is not already intimately familiar with the players and their respective situations.

Thus the desirability of soliciting first readers who have not, say, given birth to you, held your hand why you were crying over a break-up, walked down the aisle of any sacred edifice with you while either of you was wearing white…or actually was present for any occasion you depict in a manuscript. Or heard you talk about those events second-hand. They harbor preconceived notions that color their reading. That makes it awfully hard for them to judge either the event or the writing by what’s on the page alone.

By definition, a contest judge (or, for that matter, any professional reader to whom you might hand an excerpt from a larger work) is a bystander with no prior associations with the situation described. That tends to render them both less likely to find writing funny and more likely to succumb to bad laughter.

Which is why, I suspect, so many aspiring writers try to make up for that impartiality by over-selling the humor — or by trying to justify it afterward. But let’s face it, nothing kills a joke faster on paper than the narrative’s scurrying to provide an explanation of why it’s funny after the action or bon mot has already passed under the reader’s eyes. To cite a fairly popular species of this particular misguided effort:

“Why, Monique, you’ve grown so thin!” Antonia exclaimed. “Have you found a monumentally successful new diet, or have you merely been deathly ill?”

It was both an attempt at humor and a sincere question. Yes, people often do lose weight when they suffer from a major illness. But in this time period — although, obviously, not today — people often spoke about weight loss as though it were a magic trick, a secret the successful dieter was sworn never to reveal.

Monique steadied herself on the banister. “Ill, you’ll be delighted to hear.”

Pretty clunky, isn’t it? The subsequent explanation sucks the life out of what could have been a mildly funny speech, had it been left alone. It also brings the energy of the scene — and the tone of the exchange — to a screeching halt for lines on end. Besides, if it were actually crucial to the quip that the reader know the information conveyed in that second paragraph (and I don’t think it is here), wouldn’t the text be far more likely to elicit a spontaneous laugh if the reader knew about it before Antonia said it?

Many, many writers combat this problem by including guffawing onlookers as the sort of laugh track we saw in action at the top of this post: whenever a joke appears in the dialogue, the reader is told that someone nearby laughs in response. Yes, one sees this tactic used in movies and on TV all the time — sitcoms film before live audiences or use laugh tracks for a reason — but it seldom translates well to the page.

I sense some of you still don’t believe me. Take a gander, please, at another ubiquitous type of attempt to engender hilarity.

“Hi, Mac,” the bartender said. “We haven’t seen you for a while.”

Mac flashed a brilliant smile, twirling one of his guns. “I’ve been busy. You know, with the ladies.”

Everyone within earshot burst into delighted laughter, slapping their thighs and jostling one another. One patron even fell off his barstool.

“Oh, Mac,” the can-can girl with the heart of gold purred, sidling up to him, “you’re so funny.”

No, lady, he isn’t — or at least, the writer hasn’t shown him being so. The humor may well lie in his tone, or Mac may have funny teeth, but the reader is left to fill in that blank for herself. Rather than investing the creativity and elbow grease in coming up with something funny for Mac to say, the writer here has indulged in a lazy narrative trick.

To an experienced professional reader, this shortcut detracts from the humor of the scene, rather than adds to it; the bigger the onlookers’ reaction, the less funny it seems. and not merely because the Greek chorus of laughter typically does not make the joke seem funnier. To a judge, agent, or editor who has been around the literary block a few times, the onlooker’s guffaw is a flag that the author has some significant doubts about whether the joke is actually funny.

Yes, really. It’s frequently a marker of discomfort, a peek behind the scenes into the writer’s mind, distracting from the story at hand. And once the reader suspects that the writer isn’t amused, it’s only a small step to the reader’s not being amused, either.

Before anyone asks: no, you cannot construct a joke so funny that it obviates all chance of this reaction. People who laugh at their own jokes — which is how this tactic comes across on the page, right? — are seldom as amusing as people who allow their audience to decide whether what they are saying is funny or not.

You can lead a judge to funny, but you can’t make her laugh. Humor is highly subjective.

That last bit may seem self-evident, but think about it with respect to contest judging: the things that make you (and/or your nearest and dearest) chortle with glee may not be a contest judge’s proverbial cup of tea. Just as it’s never wise to assume that those passing judgment on your writing share your sex, sexual preference, political beliefs, etc., it’s not a good idea to proceed on the assumption that they will share your sense of humor.

Attempting humor is riskier than writers tend to believe. Yes, pulling off a good joke is likely to win you disproportionate points for voice — as I said, a truly amusing narrative voice, or even a stellar one-liner, is awfully welcome toward the end of a long day’s reading ultra-serious prose — but just like Olympic gymnasts or high divers who attempt a super-difficult maneuver, the chances of failure are high.

Those of you that just clutched your stomachs know where I’m going with this, I take it: attempting to be funny and missing the mark will typically cost a manuscript more than being devoid of humor. It’s not an uncommon instant-rejection reason, if Millicent stumbles across it within the first couple of pages of a submission. And if a contest entry tries to be funny and fails — especially if the dead-on-arrival joke is in the exposition, rather than the dialogue — most Mehitabels will fault the voice, dismissing it (sometimes unfairly) as not being fully developed enough to have a sense of its impact upon the reader.

Please take that risk with caution — and run the results past an impartial reader or two to ascertain every single one of those jokes will fly. It usually doesn’t take more than a couple of defunct ducks in a manuscript to move it into the not-for-us pile. If you’re not absolutely positive that it’s funny, it should go, pronto.

While I’m on the subject of purely subjective criteria, I’d like to talk about a little something that I like to call the Ta da! factor. It’s hard to define precisely, it’s when a manuscript exudes the sort of mercurial charisma that Elinor Glyn (author of that Edwardian scandal, the romance THREE WEEKS) dubbed It when it occurs in human beings. (Thus Clara Bow, the It Girl, an Elinor Glyn discovery. She also dug up a minor charmer named Rudolf Valentino.)

As Madame Glyn argued, we may not be able to define what It is, but many of us seem to drool over those who have It, when we encounter them in real life. But just telling a reader that is not going to make anyone drool.

Like It, the Ta da! factor makes a manuscript shine, practically demanding that the judge give the entry high marks. In fact — although you are not hearing this from me — a healthy dose of the Ta da! factor might even prompt a judge to fudge a little in the other categories, so as to assure the entry a point total that will launch it into the finalist round.

To achieve the Ta da! factor — well, if I could tell you that, I would chuck the blogging business entirely and establish myself as the world’s most expensive writing guru, wouldn’t I? I do know that mere professionalism is not enough. Yes, all of the technical aspects of the work need to be right, as well as the execution. The writing style needs to be strong and distinct, and it helps a lot if the story is compelling.

Beyond that, it’s a little hard to say how precisely the Ta da! factor gives a manuscript its sheen, just as it’s difficult to pin down just what makes a great first line of a book so great. Perhaps it’s rhythm, and a certain facility for telling detail.

But most of us who love literature know it when we see it, don’t we? Here’s a definite example of the Ta da! factor in action:

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and four chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a train.

That’s the opening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, Truman Capote’s masterpiece — which, speaking of odd casting, somebody really ought to make into a movie someday; the Audrey Hepburn version bears only a passing resemblance to it. (The original novella concerns a friendship between a straight woman and gay man in their late teens; the movie is about a love story between a straight man and a woman in, if you look at George Peppard charitably, their late thirties. Oh, and the endings are quite different.)

But just look at the use of language here. You could sing this opening; it’s positively bursting with the Ta da! factor.

Perhaps, too, a certain sense of showmanship is required. Bask in this one:

He was a very good-looking young man indeed, shaped to be annoyed. His voice was intimate as the rustle of sheets, and he kissed easily. There was no tallying the gifts of Charvet handkerchiefs, art moderne ash-trays, monogrammed dressing-gowns, gold key-chains, and cigarette-cases of thin wood, inlaid with views of Parisian comfort stations, that were sent him by ladies too quickly confident, and were paid for with the money of unwitting husbands, which is acceptable any place in the world.

That, my friends, is the opening to Dorothy Parker’s short story DUSK BEFORE FIREWORKS — and let me tell you, if a short story like that fell onto my desk as a contest judge, I would not only shower it with the highest possible marks (yes, even though I do not agree with all of Ms. Parker’s punctuation choices in this excerpt); I would nag the category chair unmercifully about pushing it into the finalist round.

Not only that: I would go to the awards ceremony, cheer if it won, and make a point of meeting the author. I might even introduce the author to my agent. Because, my friends, it exudes the aura of the Ta da! factor as distinctly as a bowl of excellent clam chowder exudes aroma.

I mention this, not to cow you with examples of writing by extremely talented writers, but to fill you with hope, in the midst of this long discourse on all the technical ways you can gain or lose points in the contest judging process. Ultimately, talent does supersede almost every other consideration, as long as the work is professionally presented.

This is not to say that you should not go to great lengths to avoid making the point-costing mistakes I have pointed out over the course of this series — you should, because genuinely talented writers’ work is knocked out of competition (and into agents’ rejection piles) all the time for technical reasons.

When talent is properly presented, though, the results are magical.

“One of the miracles of talent,” Mme. de Sta?l tells us, “is the ability to knock your readers out of their own egoism.” (Another favorite writer of mine; every woman who writes should read her brilliant novel CORINNE at some point. She wrote it in 1807, but apart from the travelogue sections, it’s still fresh as piping-hot cinnamon rolls today.) The Ta da! factor does just that, grabs the reader’s attention and simply insists upon this book’s being read, right now.

Under the sway of all of the publishing fads continually buffeting us, it’s all too easy for writers to forget what power really good writing has. Publishing fads, like fashions in beauty, come and go. Talent doesn’t.

Just as so many of the actors held up as exemplars of beauty now would not have been considered especially attractive in, say, the Italian Renaissance, or even a hundred years ago, I believe that many of the books published today will not be considered essential reading a hundred years from now. But the work of some authors — Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, Mme. de Sta?l, to name just a few — has something about it that elevates it above the passing fad, just as there are some actors who, it is perfectly obvious to us all, would have been considered absolutely lovely in any period of human history.

“Oh, Jo! Your one beauty!” notwithstanding.

See how right I was earlier in this post? If I hadn’t set that up, it would have fallen completely flat. Indeed, to a reader who had not read the first half of this post, the last paragraph would merely have been confusing.

The lengths to which I will go to make a point, eh?

I was serious about the Ta da! factor, though. Keep your chins up, my friends, through all the hard work of perfecting your manuscripts and contest entries; you’re toiling in a noble vineyard. Real talent is not, after all, necessarily measured in the short term.

Just ask Aunt Louisa; she’d been writing — yes, and publishing across a broad array of genres — for years before she hit the big time. Keep up the good work!

Sorry that I have not posted for a few days — earlier this week, I was saddened, as so many readers were, to hear of the death of the great Ray Bradbury. I’ve been listening for days to folks praise his novels, deservedly so, and his television work, which was — well, in respect to his memory, I’ll just say that it was less consistent. Yet strain my ears as I might, I’ve heard barely any retrospective celebration of what is arguably one of the best American short story collections ever gathered between covers, I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC.

Perhaps I am prejudiced: this collection contains one of my all-time favorite short stories in the English language, a little charmer called Tomorrow’s Child. The premise, introduced by Mr. B. himself above, is unparalleled, or perhaps I should say intriguingly paralleled: ordinary parents produce a child normal for a different dimension. Metaphorically, I think it’s one of the most sensitive, nuanced depictions of the problems of love, societal expectations, and fitting in ever written.

Not that your garden-variety writer would have any life experience with those types of problems. Nothing trajects a person more decidedly toward a literary adulthood than a perfectly happy childhood and stunningly untroubled adolescent, right?

Those of you who have even the faintest interest in how fantasy narratives can be handled, should run, not walk, to plunge into that lovely story. And while I’m shooing you toward Mr. B’s writing and we all have childhood on the brain, if you know a young person that you suspect might want to grow up to be a writer, or just want to clap your eyes on a darned fine example of evocative showing, not telling, you might want to pause in your headlong scurrying to pick up a copy of THE HALLOWEEN TREE.

Was that far-away moan of wind a group of slightly tardy banshees mourning the gentleman’s passing, or are some of you surprised that my brief eulogy did not sound precisely like the literally thousands of virtually identical tributes that have been floating around the airwaves over the past few days? “But Anne,” those glued to electronic devices point out, “you’re digressing. Furthermore, you’re breaking the rules. In order to fit in with this officially-designated period of public mourning, you’re supposed to be talking about FAHRENHEIT 451. Everyone else is.”

Why, yes, they are. Practically to the exclusion of anything else. Am I alone in feeling that is not necessarily the most meaningful way to remember the rich, diverse career of an incredibly prolific author?

Yes, yes, I know: those of us devoted to science fiction and fantasy are supposed to be falling all over ourselves with gratitude that a practitioner of a once-reviled (and still often looked down upon in high literary circles) genre is receiving any public recognition at all, but honestly, the man was a pioneer in two of ‘em. Doesn’t he deserve recognition for more than just one or two of his works?

Or is the other horrifying possibility coming to pass? Is it me, or do 97% of the people talking about him on the airwaves seem to be completely unaware that he wrote both science fiction and fantasy? Or, indeed, that there’s any distinction between the two? And if television news types do not make that fairly fundamental distinction, what other important distinctions are they not making?

What hellish new world is this? Does gravity even operate here?

And a forest of hands sprouts in the ether, bringing my tirade on respecting our literary elders to a screeching halt. “Um, Anne?” a few of you offer timidly. “I’ve been referring to my manuscript Science Fiction/Fantasy in casual conversation for years, because that’s how the bookshelf that holds similar books is labeled in my local bookstore. Yet your satirical scorn in the previous paragraph leads me to suspect that my old nemesis, Millicent the agency screener, might think I have conflated a couple of well-established book categories.”

Don’t feel bad if you fell into this particular trap — Millicent does in fact see it all the time. And for good reason: the distinction between the two is often as nebulously-defined as literary fiction; ask any six agents that handle that kind of books, and you’ll hear at least six different definitions. Perhaps seven or eight.

So I like to fall back on the classic definitions: science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable. Oh, and while I’m at it, literary fiction is closely-observed, character-driven storytelling via unusual or experimental narrative devices, assuming a well-read (and generally college-educated) audience.

Well, that solves three of the great cosmic mysteries. I guess my work is done for the day. Before I go, and so I won’t leave you hanging, here is the second part of that oddly-cast Ray Bradbury Theatre production of Tomorrow’s Child.

Just kidding; I know that some of you would like a bit more clarification of those categories. Traditionally, science fiction contains strong technological elements — thus the name — but not all science fiction presupposes advances in gadgets. Quite a lot of science fiction involves exploration of the improbable in the natural world: The world doesn’t actually work like that, but what if it did? Take the classics by H.G. Wells or Jules Verne: by making the improbable (time travel, a foodstuff that creates giant creatures, a journey to the center of the earth, etc.) possible, they were able to take those incredible premises and write about their implications in a largely realistic manner.

In a fantasy, however, the premise can, and often does, involve something that couldn’t possibly happen in the world as we know it, so there’s no need to adhere to the rules of the normal universe. The aforementioned parents finding themselves cuddling a blue pyramid, for instance. A child’s noticing that something remarkably similar to the man paying the bills in his household growing in a vat in the garage. Dorothy and Toto’s being swept up by a tornado and whisked off to Oz. A vampire and a werewolf compete for a mortal teen’s affections.

Oh, come on: you think vampires in the real world sparkle? Where’s your notion of probability?

I see half of you rolling your eyes at the very notion of having to commit to a book category, but just think about how reductive most of the eulogies we’ve been hearing about Mr. Bradbury have been: science fiction writer, period.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, accompanied by a passing reference to his having written a few Twilight Zone episodes. That’s far more limited than a Millicent working at an SF/fantasy-representing agency would have been in describing his writing.

Let’s face an unpleasant fact that I think most writers would change if our world were occupying a fantasy: we live in a reductive-minded period of history. One of the perennial annoyances of literacy lies in just how often one has to hear people clearly unfamiliar with one’s favorite authors’ work rhapsodize about them after they have died — and in how frequently one has that sinking feeling that the writing is being devalued in the process. As fond as anyone who might actually have read FAHRENHEIT 451 might be of it, it’s hard not to become slightly less so after the third or fourth newscaster mangles the plot. Or after the fifteenth or sixteenth celebrity gushes about it as though it were the only thing Ray Bradbury ever wrote.

Oh, I’m pretty sure I can tell you why we’ve been hearing about such a narrow swathe of his work: even though the man was no chicken, not everyone seemed to have a eulogy ready to hand. The television (and a surprising amount of the web) response seemed to be entirely informed by a quick trip to IMBb, rather than, say, his website. Or, if the would-be eulogizers did visit his website, they don’t seem to have read beyond the first three novels listed in his bio (FAHRENHEIT 451, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN).

Don’t get me wrong: all of these are fine pieces of writing. I would be the last person on earth to dissuade a reader from falling into a story after having been grabbed like this:

“Hey, the Illustrated Man!”

A calliope screamed, and Mr. William Philippus Phelps stood, arms folded, high on the summer-night platform, a crowd unto himself.

He was an entire civilization.

Now, I’m no fan of opening a narrative with a quote from an unidentified speaker (neither are most Millicents, incidentally), but that’s some lovely writing. But we haven’t been hearing Mr. B’s fiction quoted very much over the last few days, have we?

That’s the problem with telling about a writer’s talents, rather than showcasing his work: it’s not an adequate substitute. And in this case, I have to say that I also find it just a little snobbish. Short stories are writing, too — so isn’t it a trifle odd that the public mourning for one of the finest short story writers this country has ever produced should have included so few references to his short stories?

It seems a trifle, well, ungrateful, literarily speaking. (Especially since Morrow brought out such an excellent collection of a hundred of them a few years back. Which anyone interested in how to put a short story together might conceivably want to flip through. I’m just saying.)

A sense of continuity would be more fitting. So would a sense of history.

To be fair, though, my feeling that Ray Bradbury was insufficiently appreciated does predate his death by a couple of decades. Now that perfectly respectable adults read science fiction and fantasy as openly and shamelessly as folks read literary fiction in public, it’s hard to remember just how difficult it was for the science fiction and fantasy authors of Bradbury’s generation to get their writing taken seriously as writing. The prevailing wisdom used to be that only adolescent boys habitually read either — and that they would grow out of the taste.

Talk about fantasy, eh? Yet it had a very tangible real-world effect: for many years, newspapers and magazines seldom reviewed adult science fiction or fantasy novels at all.

That meant, among other things, that until fairly recently, science fiction and fantasy writers seldom had the luxury of assuming, as their more literarily-acceptable brethren and sistern did, that their publishing houses and book reviewers would do all of the necessary work of alerting potential readers about their books. They started going to conventions long before even writers in other genres did; they would travel far and wide to meet their readers. And, like Bradbury, they tended to have to do a heck of a lot of writing in order to make a living at it.

Okay, so that last bit hasn’t changed all that much.

All of which might perhaps explain something that should not have happened in a well-organized world: in the mid-1990s, I was walking between stores on the second floor of a large mall in a North American city that shall remain nameless when I spotted Mr. Bradbury sitting all by himself in front of a chain bookstore on the lower floor. Just waiting behind a card table and a large stack of books, ready to sign one for anyone that wanted it, without so much as an index card Scotch-taped to the front of the table to let people know who he was. No one seemed to notice him.

Seems almost unimaginable, doesn’t it, given how the media’s been talking about him for the last few days? Naturally, I trotted down to the bookstore to say hello and give him my mother’s regards; after some prompting and the purchase of several books, a store employee scared up a chair for me. And in the almost two hours we sat there, not a single passerby stopped to buy a book. Heck, no one even paused to shake his hand. And no one, but no one, dropped by to say, as we’ve been hearing the media say all week, “Hey, Mr. B., thanks for FAHRENHEIT 451. It changed my conception of (fill in the reader’s personal mental revolution here).”

Tell me, do you think one of the nation’s most beloved author’s being ignored like that is a better example of the improbable made possible, or the impossible made probable?

So can you really blame me if, each time I heard one of those doubtless heartfelt praises of FAHRENHEIT 451 or THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, and of them alone, I found myself recalling that Thomas Seward poem: “Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead/Through which the living Homer begged his bread”? Or if, the next time I heard an author complain about the necessity of promoting her book, I treated to her a quite possibly over-the-top diatribe about how she should be proud to participate in a long-standing genre tradition?

Aren’t you glad that I held off from posting?

I’m eager to get back to the business at hand now, however — which was, if you can recall as far back as a couple of weeks ago, an ongoing, in-depth discussion of what does and does not tend to work in a literary contest entry. Not too many of you have been commenting upon this series, I have noticed; hard to know whether that’s due to relatively few of you planning to enter a writing contest anytime soon or to the undeniable fact that smartphones and iPads have transformed many formerly-commenting blog readers into non-interacting column-perusers.

Speaking of how times have and have not changed. I honestly do like to hear from my readers.

Because so much of what tends to trip up the average contest entry can also annoy Millicent the agency screener, I shall be pressing ahead with this series for the nonce. To render it more broadly useful, however, I shall veer away from that subject dear to Mehitabel the veteran contest judge’s heart — how to avoid technical violations that might get your entry disqualified — and steer us into the murkier waters of ways in which writing often loses points for larger reasons.

That’s right, people: we’re going to be talking about style.

And the masses shout for joy. I can’t say as I blame you: before we paused for our recent Series Series of guest blogs, I had been urging those of you who like to enter contests to run through your entries with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, searching not only for spelling, grammar, and formatting errors, but tiny rule violations as well. Somewhere in the ether, writers’ subconsciouses were wailing, “But I thought the point of a literary contest was to judge the quality of the writing, not how well I could follow directions or if I know how to format a manuscript correctly.”

I sympathize with that cri de coeur. Truly, I do. But it is my sad duty to remind potential contest entrants — and potential submitters to agencies and publishing houses, while I’m at it — that to a professional reader’s eyes, incorrect formatting, odd typefaces, and other unexpected manuscript peculiarities are darned distracting. Reading past them is sort of like trying to enjoy a ballet while a drill team performs maneuvers with large flags in the orchestra pit.

To continue our running theme: while it is possible for a determined Mehitabel or Millicent to concentrate upon the artistic values of the performance, it’s not particularly probable, even with the best will in the world. Revising your good writing to minimize those distractions is essentially showing that drill team the door, so the ballet may proceed undisturbed. (And so the orchestra will have somewhere to sit.)

Yes, it’s a rather unpleasant process, especially on a tight deadline — but hey, welcome to the life of a professional writer. We’re constantly having to revise our work on deadlines. It’s grumpy-making. And at the risk of depressing you, for most authors, that grumpiness never really goes away.

Don’t believe me? If you want proof, try having a civil discussion about grammar with an author who is proofing his galleys. Caged tigers ten minutes before feeding time are friendlier.

So I like to think of pre-contest (and pre-submission) revision as the farm team games for the major leagues of writing. No one hits fifteen home runs in a row the first time she picks up a baseball bat, right? The pros put in a heck of a lot of batting practice before they get good at it.

In that spirit, I have an observation– and what I’m about to say next may startle some of you, so go ahead and grab onto the nearest heavy object, to brace yourself: the less a writer enjoys revision, the more important the pre-entry once-over is.

And not merely for the sake of the entry — although, since virtually no writer’s first draft is so polished that it couldn’t use a spot of revision, it is a genuinely good idea to make a sweep for common problems, over and above a standard spell-check. The ability to look at one’s own work critically is a vital skill for a professional writer.

Why? Because even if the Archangel Gabriel himself dropped a perfectly-formatted manuscript by Shakespeare, proofread by Mme. de Sta?l, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Austen, and Confucius, and with ready-made jacket blurbs from Edith Wharton, Gustave Flaubert, and Sophocles onto the desk of the most literature-hungry agent in the land, I guarantee you that the agent will ask for at least one revision.

And that’s before the editor gets her hands on it. Or anyone even begins to consider the problems of attracting one’s admiring public to a book signing.

This comes as a shock to most writers who have just landed an agent or sold a first book — but their reaction is a minor tremor compared to the major earthquake that writers who have not learned to read their work critically experience. Writers who have never gained the skill of accepting feedback as part of the job of writing, rather than a personal attack, tend not only to be knocked off their feet by their first encounters with professional feedback, but to feel as if a tidal wave hit them as well.

This sight always makes me feel just a bit sad, partially because there’s so little sympathy in the industry for this particular stripe of culture shock. As I’ve mentioned many times before, professional readers don’t typically pull their punches: if they’re critiquing your work, it’s because they think you have talent; if you didn’t, they would not take the time. So learning to take critique gracefully, as well as rejection, is a valued skill in a writer.

If you’d like to know just how strongly your garden-variety agent prefers writers capable of self-revision after feedback to ones that have meltdowns about it, drop in at that bar that’s never more than a hundred yards from the registration desk at any given conference, wait until the third round is in hand, and ask the nearest agent to tell you her favorite client horror story. 99.9% of the time, that story will involve an author whose response to feedback was negative.

Brace yourself, though, for every other agent and editor in the bar to have a story like this to tell. You may be in for a long night.

I can feel some of you shifting uncomfortably in your chairs. “Um, Anne?” I hear a few voices murmur, “I thought we were going to be moving on to style. Have you merely digressed, or are you telling us all of this just to pass along general information about working in the biz? Or — and I have a feeling this is what you’re doing — are you trying to brace us for the shock of the next set of standards you’d like us to apply to our entries before sending them out?”

Set your minds at ease, my darlings: I’ve been doing both. I’m about to encourage you to add another valuable wrench to your writer’s tool bag. The next common contest entry problem is going to require you to muster all of your concentration to weed out, but believe me, once you learn to spot it, you’ll wonder how you ever self-edited before.

I’m referring, of course, to skipping logical steps in arguments or plots, assuming that the reader will simply fill in the gaps for herself. This pervasive problem affects both coherence and continuity — and can consequently cost an entry a ton of points.

One really does have to see this phenomenon in action to understand why. I can do no better than to refer my faithful readers to Nietzsche’s THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA as an illustration. (Take that, literary snobs that don’t believe well-educated people read science fiction or fantasy.) Try following this little gem from Part II. I dare you:

Behold, this is the hole of the tarantula. So you want to see the tarantula itself? Here hangs its web; touch it, hat it tremble!

There it comes willingly: welcome, tarantula! Your triangle and symbol sits black on your back; and I also know what sits in your soul. Revenge sits in your soul: wherever you bite, black scabs grow; your poison makes the soul whirl with revenge.

Thus I speak to you in a parable — you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights. Therefore I tear at your webs, that your rage may lure you out of your lie-holes and your revenge may leap out from behind your word justice. For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.

Hands up, anyone who didn’t say, “Huh?” at least once while reading that.

That’s not the only confusing passage in the book, either. Following the narrative of Nietzsche’s book is like watching a mountain goat leap from crag to crag on a blasted mountainside; the goat may be able to get from one promontory to another with no trouble, but those of us tagging behind actually have to walk up and down the intervening gullies. The connective logic between one point and the next is frequently far from clear, or even downright wacko — and in a book that proposes that the writer and reader both might be logically superior to other people, that’s a serious coherence problem.

Would you believe that this type of argumentation actually isn’t all that uncommon in contest entries? Particularly in nonfiction entries on political or social topics — where, as in this case, the author can make the fatal mistake of assuming that Mehitabel will share his political and/or social beliefs. Even a judge who didn’t feel that the metaphor was forced and tautological (Nietzsche likes neither tarantulas nor egalitarians, so they must perforce be similar enough to have the same motivations?) might well dismiss the argument as prejudiced (he’s presuming that tarantulas are all mean, whereas I have known some very sweet ones not at all inclined to bite philosophers).

What would most likely get a contest judge to run screaming from this passage, though, is not the overworked metaphor, but the skipped logical steps. Let’s take a look at why this phenomenon is so disturbing in print. An argument with a logical leap in it appears from the reader’s perspective to run rather like this:

1. Socrates was a man.

2. Socrates was wise.

3. Therefore, men who want to be wise should not wear socks.

Clearly, there is some plank of the argument missing here. In order to prove Proposition 3, the writer would first have to show that

(a) Socrates did not wear socks (I have no idea if this is true; the statue above is no help on the subject. But hey, Greece is a warm country, so it’s entirely possible he didn’t.)

(b) non-sock wearing had some tangible and demonstrable effect upon his mental processes that cannot be explained by other contributing factors, such as years of study or having a yen for conversation with smart people, and

(c) the bare ankle experiment’s success was not dependent upon some exogenous variable, such as the fact that socks would have looked really stupid worn with a toga.

It would make sense, too, to establish that Socrates is a proper role model for modern men to emulate, as opposed to scruffy old sock-wearing moral thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps the book could even include a compare-and-contrast of the intellectual achievements of famous sock-wearing individuals versus those of the air-blessed ankles. By the end of such a well-argued disquisition, the reader might well become converted to the author’s premise, and cast his footwear from him forever with a cry of grateful liberation.

And half of you are once again rolling your eyes. “Talk about the improbable made possible!” you hoot. “This could not possibly be common in contest entries or submissions to agencies!”

You obviously have never been a judge in a literary contest. (Or advised an undergraduate thesis in political philosophy, for that matter. I could tell you tales.)

Admittedly, Nietzsche allegedly wrote his book in a three-day frenzy while confined to an insane asylum due to a — avert your eyes, children — particularly virulent case of syphilis, so perhaps it is not fair to expect world-class coherence from him. The average literary contest entrant, however, does not have so good an excuse, and should not expect the judges to cut him any slack in the logic department.

If Millicent ever has the opportunity to write connective logic??? in one of your margins, your presentation score is sunk. Ditto if your pages are lurking under Millicent’s pen.

So I must advise: make sure you’re filling in the relevant gullies. Read over your entry for coherence.

Should I be concerned about those of you that have sunk to the floor, moaning? “I could take the discussion of death,” the overpowered gasp, “as well as the sober contemplation of just how little support living authors, even famous ones, often receive for their literary efforts. I even kept my chin from trembling while you were telling me it was my responsibility as a serious writer to get used to submitting my work for unblinking critique. But now you’re telling me that I might not even be able to tell without re-reading my work if my narration is coherent? I feel myself slipping into a stupor.”

Oh, dear. What can I do to cheer you up?

Oh, I know: Nietzsche did one thing in THUS SPAKE ZARTHUSTRA that might help him win back style points from Mehitabel — include genuinely funny lines. It’s actually quite an amusing book, coherence problems aside, and not only because of them.

On the remote chance that I’m being too subtle here: very, very few contest entries are genuinely funny — and you wouldn’t believe how much even a single good laugh from an entry will improve the average Millicent’s opinion of it. I’ve seen it add enough points to raise a borderline entry into the finalist round, in fact.

I’m not talking about just fleeting smile funny, mind you, but stop reading long enough to laugh aloud funny. But that’s a subject for another day. For now, I leave you to ponder the joys and benefits of logical coherence. For practice, perhaps you might like to examine how I brought this little essay through short, comprehensible consecutive steps from a discussion of writerly hypersensitivity to a contemplation of comedy.

Hey, I’m a professional; it took years of practice to perfect that trick.

It also, in case you had been wondering, took me years of contest judging and manuscript editing to appreciate Millicent’s frustration with the ubiquity of the borrowed-from-short-stories plotting practice of not leaving the reader with a well-defined, dramatically-satisfying ending. Not sure why? Well, let me ask those of you that watched the first two parts of Tomorrow’s Child: didn’t you want to know how it ended?

So will both Millicent and Mehitabel. It’s a natural human urge to want to see a storyline dramatically resolved. So here you go.

Thank you for everything, Mr. B; you will be missed. Far off in the literary heavens, I know you will be keeping up the good work.